A Grammar and Dictionary of Rengao: An Austroasiatic Language of the Vietnam Central Highlands (Grammars and Sketches of the World's Languages, 21)

The volume crystalizes the Gregerson’s field work in the Kontum Province of Vietnam from 1968 to 1974, in collaboration with Rengao speakers Paul Hyum and Andre Ir. The result is a sketch grammar, a dictionary with over 6000 entries, and a text collection. Rengao is a North Bahnaric language within the Austroasiatic phylum: it features a typologically unusual tense-lax phonological contrast whose origins remain obscure, and an extensive “expressive” lexicon of onomatopoeic, ideophonic, and phonaesthemic forms integrel to the rich Rengao oral culture. The work also includes substbatial commentary on grammaticalization, borrowing and etymology.

Kenneth J. Gregerson, Ph.D. (1971), University of Washington. Served with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. He has published on Vietnamese, Austroasiatic (especially Rengao), Ideophones, Languages of the Vietnam-China Borderlands and languages of Indonesia.

Marilyn J. Gregerson, Ph.D. (1991), University of Texas at Arlington and Rice University, dissertation “The Rengao of Vietnam: an Ethnography of Texts”. Worked as an anthropology and literacy consultant with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in Vietnam and Indonesia.

Paul Sidwell, PhD. (1999), University of Melbourne. Worked for the Australian National University (Canberra), Max Planck Institute for Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), Center for Research in Computational Linguistics (Bangkok) and serves as President of the Southeast Aslian Linguistics Society.