danniperson

[This is a revision of a review I first posted to 50books_poc on March 10th, 2011. It has been edited for clarity.]

This is a teaching grammar of the language which is now more properly called Tohono O'odham. (It appears that later editions of the book are indeed called A Tohono O'odham Grammar. The edition I have is from 1997.) It's the language of the Tohono O'odham people, of what is now called Arizona and northern Mexico. In 2007 the language was reported to have 14,000 speakers, including the mutually intelligible Pima O'odham dialect, and revitalization efforts are ongoing.

Ofelia Zepeda is a native speaker and a linguist. She wrote this book to be used in the classroom, both for O'odham who lack full fluency, and for interested outsiders. The material is in the form of lessons, with discussion of the grammar, vocabulary lists, dialogues, and exercises. There are special advanced exercises for native speakers, challenging them to analyze their own speech and describe why certain constructions sound right and others do not, which is a cool addition and really drives home that the primary audience is the O'odham community itself.

The presentation is linguistically informed, but technical terms are largely avoided. There is nothing more exotic than the sorts of words you'd find in a high school language class. But the book doesn't stand on its own as a Teach Yourself; it's obviously supposed to be a textbook for a class. The answers to the exercises are not provided. The phonology section is extremely sparse and vague, which is fine if you have people to hear and talk to, but not if you're trying to learn alone. Many of the finer points are under-explained (if you don't already know the difference between perfective and imperfective, I don't think you'll really know after reading this book either), and they're the kind of things your teacher would go over with you.

While I wouldn't rely on this book to teach you the language, it does cover quite a bit of ground for not being very long, so if you're the kind of person (like me) who reads about a language not because you're planning to speak it but simply because languages are awesome, it may well appeal to you. American Indian grammars written by native speakers aren't exactly a dime a dozen, so I was pleased to get my hands on this one.