The Chechen language has approximately 1.2 million speakers, and is one of the largest indigenous languages of the northern Caucasus. This bilingual dictionary contains 6000 words of essential vocabulary for Chechen: Basic verbs; pronouns, numerals, particles, conjunctions, and postpositions; common and everyday vocabulary and many entries of the rapidly disappearing traditional vocabulary. All entries have grammatical information and pronunciation guides and are given in both the current Cyrillic orthography and a user-friendly diacritic-free all-Latin transcription. Similar grammatical and pronunciation information is given in the English-Chechen section. Additionally, this dictionary gives background information about the language and descriptions of the sound system and grammar.

The Chechen language has about 1,200,000 speakers, and along with Ingush is one of the largest indigenous languages of the northern Caucasus. The Russian-Chechen wars have created refugee and immigrant populations in Russia and Europe, and these populations are anxious to maintain the younger generations' fluency in Chechen and uphold ethnic and linguistic consciousness among expatriate Chechens worldwide. This bilingual dictionary has approximately 5000 Chechen words and about 5000 English words. The Chechen words are cited in both current Cyrillic orthography and the Latin system. Entries have full grammatical information and glossaries include alternatives and comments so as to convey the full meanings of words as opposed to simply translating them.

Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound-symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Beginning with an evocative typology of sound-symbolic processes, they go on to examine not only the well-known areas of study, such as onomatopoeia and size-sound symbolism, but also less frequently discussed topics such as the sound-symbolic value of vocatives and of involuntary noises, and the marginal areas of "conventional sound symbolism", such as phonesthemes. The book concludes with a series of studies on the biological basis of sound symbolism, and draws comparisons with the communication systems of other species. This is a definitive work on the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. The wide-ranging new research presented here reveals that sound symbolism plays a far more significant role in language than scholarship has hitherto recognized.

Sound symbolism is the study of the relationship between the sound of an utterance and its meaning. In this interdisciplinary collection of new studies, twenty-four leading scholars discuss the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. They consider sound-symbolic processes in a wide range of languages from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. Beginning with an evocative typology of sound-symbolic processes, they go on to examine not only the well-known areas of study, such as onomatopoeia and size-sound symbolism, but also less frequently discussed topics such as the sound-symbolic value of vocatives and of involuntary noises, and the marginal areas of "conventional sound symbolism", such as phonesthemes. The book concludes with a series of studies on the biological basis of sound symbolism, and draws comparisons with the communication systems of other species. This is a definitive work on the role of sound symbolism in a theory of language. The wide-ranging new research presented here reveals that sound symbolism plays a far more significant role in language than scholarship has hitherto recognized.

Comprehensive reference grammar of Ingush, a language of the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian or East Caucasian language family of the central Caucasus (southern Russia). Ingush is notable for its complex phonology, prosody including minimal tone system, complex morphology of both nouns and verbs, clause chaining, long-distance reflexivization, and extreme degree of syntactic ergativity.
Johanna Nichols is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Affiliate Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley. She works on languages of the Caucasus, typology, and the linguistic prehistory of the steppe periphery.

In this ground-breaking book, Johanna Nichols proposes means of describing, comparing, and interpreting linguistic diversity, both genetic and structural, providing the foundations for a theory of diversity based upon population science. This book will interest linguists, archaeologists, and population specialists.
"An awe-inspiring book, unequalled in scope, originality, and the range of language data considered."--Anna Siewierska, "Linguistics"
"Fascinating. . . . A brilliant pioneering study."--"Journal of Indo-European Studies"
"A superbly reasoned book."--John A. C. Greppin, "Times Literary Supplement"

Scholars have long sought to discover whether there is a detectable genetic relationship among the world's languages, whether linguistic methods can demonstrate that all of the world's languages evolved from a single "mother tongue". In this book, Johanna Nichols offers original and important material that is likely to change significantly the way this exploration is conducted. For over a century, the comparative method has been the principle analytic tool in the reconstruction of prehistoric languages from which historically attested languages have developed. This method looks for regular laws which govern sound correspondences among the cognate words of related languages. The problem with cross-linguistic work based on theories of sameness is that it is necessarily limited to seeking genetic relatedness and reducing structural variety to types. It is restricted to shallow time depths and cannot draw inferences from diversity. But unless it is fairly well understood in what ways languages may group and differ over great depths of time within a geographical area, speculation about whether a certain isolated shared feature signals a genetic relationship is futile. In this groundbreaking book, Nichols proposes means of describing, comparing, and interpreting linguistic diversity, both genetic and structural, and thereby provides the foundations for a theory of diversity based upon population science. Using a database of 174 languages representing the world's linguistic families and surveying a number of structural features and grammatical categories as well as geographical distribution, Nichols establishes the relative frequencies and markedness of grammatical properties, theirinteraction with each other, their relative diachronic stability, and their correlations with geographical location and type of linguistic area. Maps, tables, appendices, and a reproduction of the sample and database will enable readers to test Nichols's conclusions, explore further hypotheses, expand existing databases, and assign cross-linguistic problems to students. This book will be of critical interest to linguists, archaeologists, population specialists, and anyone interested in ways of classifying mankind.