This volume is a collection of articles concerned with the typology of valency and valence change in a large and diversified sample of languages that display ergative alignment in their grammar. The authors are specialists on one or more ergative language(s), on which many of them have produced grammatical descriptions. The sample of languages represented in these descriptive contributions covers most of the geographical areas and linguistic families in which ergativity has been known to exist jointly with well-developed morphological voice, and some languages belonging to families in which ergativity or voice were not previously recognized or adequately described up to now. Geographical regions covered are the Americas, the Caucasus, Asia, and Near East.

Juhuri (Judeo-Tat), the language of the so-called "Mountain Jews" of Daghestan and Azerbaijan, belongs to the Caucasian Tat group of South-Western Iranian. Its Iranian heritage, reflected by noteworthy archaisms, constitutes an important component of the language, but Juhuri has also been under the influence of Turkic and indigenous Caucasian languages since it arrived in the Caucasus more than a millenium ago. Owing to its unique history as the language of an Iranian Jewish community in the Caucasus, Juhuri exhibits many unusual and typologically rather remarkable characteristics. The book, based on written sources complemented by the author's fieldwork, offers a comprehensive description of the language, each feature illustrated by numerous example sentences, and concludes with sample texts and a full glossary.