Celebrating 100 Years of IJAL

Abstract

The study of American languages in Voegelin’s time continued to straddle the fields of anthropology and linguistics, and IJAL was produced under the auspices of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Anthropological Association, with the cooperation of the Conference on American Indian Languages, which met annually with the AAA. Although the focus of IJAL remained on studies of the languages of the Americas, there was a brief period during the Voegelin years when papers on languages from other parts of the world began to appear in the Journal; and from the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Journal also published a number of supplements in conjunction with the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics. These supplements, which have fallen out of circulation and are not included in the back issues of IJAL available online, covered a very wide range of topics and included an English translation of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (Propp 1958) and the first edition of Greenberg’s The Languages of Africa (Greenberg 1963). They also included a number of important works on American languages that we will reissue in electronic form as supplements to the Journal over the coming months.