Alexander Vovin†, José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente and Juha Janhunen (eds.): <i>The Tungusic Languages</i> (Routledge Language Family Series.) xxviii, 543 pp. London: Routledge, 2024. ISBN 9781138845039.

The book under review is "the first comprehensive handbook of Tungusic in English" (p.xviii).Tungusic constitutes "a medium-sized language-family with some 15 different languages distributed over a vast territory in Northeast Asia" (p. 1).The forerunner of the present volume planned by Alexander Vovin over 20 years ago never appeared (p.xix).Due to the delay to the project, two sketches of Uilta and Solon intended for that volume were published independently by Toshir Tsumagari in 2009 (Journal of the Graduate School of Letters 2 and 4).Jos Andrs Alonso de la Fuente was later invited to the project, which finally succeeded after Juha Janhunen, who had already edited the volume The Mongolic Languages in the same Routledge Language Family Series in 2003, joined the editorial team.The project was sadly overshadowed by the loss of one of the editors and two contributors: "Sasha Vovin (1961-2022) himself died only several months before the completion of the project, while Tsumagari Toshiro and Daniel Kane (1948-2021) also passed away without having seen the final versions of their texts" (p.xix).The volume contains an index (pp.538-43) and 20 chapters that can be divided into two main parts: (1) The bulk of the volume consists of descriptions of 14 Tungusic varieties (pp.76-500) that "follow a roughly uniform template" (p.xviii) and cover various details ranging from the research history, over phonology and grammar (e.g.converbs, person marking), to aspects of the lexicon (e.g.loanwords).These descriptions include Jurchen (Kane and Miyake, pp.76-102), yet another sketch of Written Manchu (Vovin, pp.103-38), Siberian Ewenki (Janhunen, pp.139-83), Orochen (Whaley, pp.184-205), Solon (Baek, pp.206-33), Neghidal (Oskolskaya, pp.234-59), Ewen (Malchukov, pp.260-93), Oroch (Kazama, pp.294-325), Udihe (Perekhvalskaya and Janhunen, pp.326-63), Nanai (Kazama, pp.364-406), Ulcha (Kazama, pp.407-35), Uilta (Tsumagari and Yamada, Spoken Manchu (Zikmundov and Gao Wa, and Sibe (Zikmundov,.(2) The sketches are preceded (pp.1-75) and followed (pp.501-537) by several chapters addressing more specific topics, such as an introduction to the language family (Janhunen, pp.1-18), an overview of "early" Chinese, Korean, and Japanese sources (Vovin, pp.19-25), a cursory list of European sources published between 1692 and 1856 (Alonso de la Fuente, pp.26-34), and a discussion of sociolinguistic aspects, such as the official status or endangerment (Mamontova,.The chapter "Tungusic in time and