Sidwell Paul. Classifying the Austroasiatic languages: History and state of the art

München: LINCOM, 2009. — 166 p.The Austroasiatic (Austro-Asiatic) phylum (macro-family) spans South and Southeast Asia, with more than 150 languages over a dozen branches. Speaker communities vary from villages of just a few dozens up to national languages such as Cambodian and Vietnamese with millions of speakers. Much of the territory has been divided and overlain by incoming waves of speakers of other groups (Indic [Indo-Aryan], Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Tai, Hmong-Mien [Miao-Yao], Austronesian), creating a vast region of ethnolinguistic diversity. The present survey is intended to serve as a reference work and an outline of the historiography of the field. The text is rich in figures (tree diagrams etc.), tables and plates (maps etc.).