Language documentation is a rapidly emerging new field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language.

Editors' preface Ch. 1: Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? (Nikolaus P. Himmelmann)Ch. 2: Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis (Arienne M. Dwyer)Ch. 3: Fieldwork and community language work (Ulrike Mosel)Ch. 4: Data and language documentation (Peter K. Austin)Ch. 5: The ethnography of language and language documentation (Jane H. Hill)Ch. 6: Documenting lexical knowledge (John B. Haviland)Ch. 7: Prosody in language documentation (Nikolaus P. Himmelmann)Ch. 8: Ethnography in language documentation (Bruna Franchetto)Ch. 9: Linguistic annotation (Eva Schultze-Berndt)Ch. 10: The challenges of segmenting spoken language (Nikolaus P. Himmelmann)Ch. 11: Orthography development (Frank Seifart)Ch. 12: Sketch grammar (Ulrike Mosel)Ch. 13: Archiving challenges (Paul Trilsbeek, Peter Wittenburg)Ch. 14: Linguistic documentation and the encoding of textual materials (Jost Gippert)Ch. 15: Thick interfaces: mobilizing language documentation with multimedia (David Nathan) Abbreviations and resourcesReferencesIndexes:Language IndexSubject Index