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Erika Sandman. 2016. A Grammar of Wutun. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Doctoral dissertation, xii, 370 p. [http://bit.ly/2C0jMCY, accessed 13 December 2017]. An occasional problem when doing research on the languages of northern China is that while there are medium-sized structuralist, historical, and contemporary grammars for many local non-Sinitic varieties (e.g., Todaeva 1966, Chen and Cinggeltei 1986, and Fried 2010 for Bonan), the same does not seem to be equally true for their Sinitic contact varieties. A Grammar of Wutun, a dissertation written by Erika Sandman at the two departments of World Culture and Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki, helps close this gap for what has since Chen (1981) been known as one of the most idiosyncratic varieties of North-Western Mandarin. This language formed as part of the Amdo Sprachbund in intensive contact with Amdo Tibetan and, to some extent, Qinghai Bonan. A Grammar of Wutun is based on Basic Linguistic Theory (Dixon 1997, 2010) and tends to make use of well-established classics for individual linguistic domains (e.g., Lamprecht 1994 for information structure, Yap et al. 2011 for nominalization). Based on a corpus of approximately 1,300 naturally attested and 1,100 elicited clauses mostly collected by the author herself, it first describes the sociolinguistic and research context (1-18), the phonology (19-41, following Janhunen et al. 2008) and word classes (42-175, nouns, verbs, minor) of Wutun. After attested morphological forms are thus accounted for, it continues by describing functional domains such as aspect (176-205); evidentiality and egophoricity (206-239); clausal word order, valency, and information structure (240-286); clause-type-related morphological mechanisms for interrogating, ordering, and negating (287-310); and clause connection (311-348). The book closes with glossed and translated transcriptions of three short procedural monologues (349-361). In the nominal domain, Wutun exhibits an interesting distinction in the plural domain. The suffix -jhege can indicate either numbers of approximately 3 to 4 or generic groups (e.g., lhoma-jhege 'a few students' / 'students (in general)' when following regular nouns, but it refers to non-collective groups with personal pronouns (ngu-jhege 'each of us individually'). It contrasts with -dera ~ -duru used for delimited groups with regular nouns (ren-dera 'the people (e.g., of this country)'), and with -mu, denoting collectives when attached to pronouns (nga-mu 'we (as a group)'; 48-50, 71-72). Wutun has also developed a case system with a zero nominative and five marked cases. Particularly notable among these are the sociative in -liangge which grammaticalized from 'two' (cf. SM liăng ge 'two') (56-61) and the "optional dative" in -ha that is used to mark several types of non-actors and functions as a form of differential case marking conditioned by information structure (277-286). ...