Language Book Catalogue

I collect language guides and grammars! This is a catalogue of my collection so far. There are still a lot of languages I don't have books for that I'd like to find - any wishlist languages are marked in red.

I'm limited not only in budget and location (what I can find in my local charity shops) but also in the politics of language books - not every language will have a phrasebook or grammar written for it, especially if it's a language spoken by indigenous people or used in a country that isn't a popular tourist destination. There's a lot to think about even when you do come across a book for a "less popular" language: who wrote this? Why? I was really excited to find my Hawaiian dictionary because it was actually written by a native Hawaiian scholars and not a racist white minister like my Xhosa phrasebook or Mi'kmaq dictionary. Written grammars can also be a fantastic accidental glimpse into the politics of their language, like how the foreword for Speak Lebanese is "dedicated to those Lebanese who were born far away from Lebanon, to the children of those who left Lebanon during the war and to those of Lebanese descent whose fathers and grand fathers were born overseas."

Any book titles in bold like this are favourites and are my recommendations for that section. A language enclosed in closed brackets [like this] means that's the language the book is written in.