South Asia is home to a large number of languages and dialects. The considerable body of linguists working on this region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale. Despite this, there has so far been no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst South Asian linguists. The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics is designed to be just that forum. It brings together empirical and theoretical research and serves as a testing ground for the articulation of new ideas and approaches which may be grounded in a study of South Asian languages but which have universal applicability. The essays in this, the fifth volume of the Yearbook, cover important grammatical and sociolinguistic issues. In the invited contributions section, Davison looks at agreement features and projections of tense and aspect, while Agnihotri and Janda and Joseph revisit sociolinguistics and Sanskrit respectively in order to set the record straight. The open submissions section covers a very wide range indeed. Whereas Peterson and Sharma look at complex arrays of facts in Nepali and Hindi, Ravanam opens the door to a new kind of sociolinguistics and Saleemi revisits a problem not likely to go away soon. The regional reports section includes not only a standard report from Europe but also a personal assessment of linguistics in India by one of the associate editors (Dasgupta). The rich fare offered in the review section is followed by an extremely interesting dialogue section, which contains Satterfield’s thoughtful assessment of the problem of syntax learnability, discussed by Saleemi in his contribution. This section also contains Bhattacharya’s plea to examine what he argues is quite possibly a fallacy in the formulation of an important principle in current generative syntax, and the Chief Editor’s invitation to scholars working on Indian English to look at lexical innovation in IE a bit more carefully. In the words of the Chief Editor, ‘other than excellence and non-isolationism, we have no agenda and no thematic priorities’. This pioneering series will interest all those in fields of sociolinguistics, language studies, grammar, literature and sociology.
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