A History of the Study of the Indigenous Languages of North America. By Marcin Kilarski (= Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 129). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2021. xiv, 443pp. €105 US$158. ISBN 978 90 272 1049 4 HB 978 90 272 5897 7 E-BOOK Reviewed by John E. Joseph (University of Edinburgh) In this review I hope to give a clear picture of the originality, solidity and significance of the research here contained, but must first advise readers that this is not the broad history that the title leads one to expect. Its scope is in fact quite narrow. Having detected how “little attention has been paid to the history of indi- vidual linguistic examples” (p. 1), Kilarski says in the introductory chapter that “This book aims at filling the gap in the historiography of Americanist linguis- tics by offering a comprehensive analysis of the variable functions of references to Algonquian, Iroquoian and Eskimo-Aleut languages […]” (p.2). “More specif- ically, I examine descriptions of selected phonological, lexical and grammatical phenomena” which commentators have used “to illustrate what they perceived as the most characteristic properties of the languages and their speakers” (p. 1). To be sure, much of what Kilarski demonstrates concerning the use of par- ticular examples in accounts of three of the several dozen North American lan- guage families can be extrapolated and generalised; 1 but a more precise title would equally surely have done better service to the book and its potential read- ership. If it is a history of the study of the indigenous languages of North America that you are looking for, Andresen (1990) remains your best bet, though it stops with the founding of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924. The perceived properties Kilarski refers to are summarised quite succinctly with an “Overview of structural characteristics” in Chapter 2, which opens with a history of the three language families, the languages they include, and the causes of their decline in the 19th and 20th centuries. The key characteristics include the languages’ phonetic inventories, oſten described in terms of whatever makes them look anomalous in comparison with what Benjamin Lee Whorf (1896–1941) called “Standard Average European”. In terms of grammatical structure, polysyn- https://doi.org/10.1075/hl.00115.jos | Published online: 15 June 2023 Historiographia Linguistica 49:2/3 (2022), pp. 405–411. ISSN 0302-5160 | E‑ISSN 1569-9781 Available under the CC BY 4.0 license. © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company 1. Kilarski says there are “around 50” North American language families (p. 9). The exact fig- ure is and has always been disputed, but numbers between 40 and 60 are typically given, in addition to isolates.