Warren A. Brewer first toured Asia in 1968 as part of a U.S. Army infantry unit. He subsequently used the GI Bill to attend UC Berkeley, whence he graduated in 1974 summa cum laude with a B.A. in linguistics, at a time when it was still possible to combine field methodology with philology. In 1984, he received his PhD in Indo-European Studies at UCLA. His life was outsourced to Taiwan in 1986, where he has been on the faculty of the Tamkang University English Department ever since.

What possible contribution could an Indo-Europeanist make to the linguistic record of Taiwan? In fact, Taiwan linguistics lacks the foundation upon which other, more mature language disciplines have been based: It has no comparative grammars, etymological dictionaries, or linguistic atlases, for any of its language varieties. Working in these areas on the island would indeed be a lonely chore. Operating mostly on shoestring budgets for two decades, Brewer has collected 1,400 recordings of Southern Min and Hakka interviews; folk narratives supplemented responses to structured questionnaires. For data analysis, only off-the-shelf software and hardware were used.

To begin filling in one of the fundamental lacunæ, Brewer's monograph purports to be a contribution towards a linguistic atlas of Taiwan. It is a microscopic view of language distribution, in which each lexeme is defined, not only by denotation, but also by (i) an inventory of phonetic variants and (ii) seven informant background factors (age, sex, language use, ethnicity, education, occupation, and residential history). Just three Taiwanese Southern Min words are scrutinized in depth in this study, words for 'thumb', 'goose', and 'bat', illustrated with 90 maps.