The present volume deals specifically with language contact, dialect contact, and standardization. The scope of the documentation is defined by the policy that the research was to be done exclusively from primary sources. Five hundred ten titles, selected from 71 monographs, journals, and periodicals published in China and parts of Southeast Asia…

The author considers the issues of linguistic diversity (distribution of variation within communities) and linguistic distance (degree of variation between varieties within a system or between variety systems). He seeks to emphasize the usefulness for further development of distance studies of the concept of language area (Sprachbund), the…

Reports on three surveys of Australian Aboriginal language use, undertaken to determine the language groups' needs for translation and literacy projects, are presented. "Communicability of Some Western Desert Communilects" by K. C. Hansen evaluates mutual intelligibility between languages and dialects in that region, and addresses the complicating…