The Routledge Handbook of Asian Languages

Asia is not only the world’s largest and most populous continent, it is also the home of about 2,300 currently spoken languages which reflect its enormous ethnic and cultural diversity. Its vast population does not only speak widely known languages like Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Persian, but also a large number of languages spoken by small speech communities, among them Burushaski, Chukchi, Hmong, Ket, Semelai and Tzez. Asia also offers a unique view back to several millennia of the human linguistic past, as it shows up in the text sources available for numerous languages, among them Sumerian, Akkadian, Sanskrit and Old Chinese.

About one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Asia. The present handbook aims to offer a comprehensive survey of the structural richness that is reflected in the languages of this vast continent. The book provides exemplary descriptions in fourteen chapters on language families, two chapters on geographic groupings of languages without genealogical relatedness (Caucasian, Paleosiberian), a chapter on contact languages (Pidgins and Creoles) and a chapter on language isolates. Each chapter starts with a survey of the languages involved and the genealogical structure of the language family it describes. Contained within these sections are a selected number of individual language descriptions, living languages as well as extinct languages. For the purpose of an optimal coverage of structural diversity, the handbook covers the major languages of Asia as well as languages spoken only by small communities. There will be additional sections on the diachronic development of individual languages and the typological variation within languages spoken by large communities.

This handbook is a detailed resource for students and researchers alike on the structure and history of Asian languages.