Thomas Grahame Bailey (1872–1942) had the components of this work printed in individual parts in India between 1902 and 1906. The Royal Asiatic Society in London decided to collect and publish them in 1908 in its monograph series, incorporating a preface by Bailey. The pagination is not continuous as already printed sheets of the earlier studies were reused. Twenty-six dialects from the hill regions of the northern and north-western Himalayas are covered in some detail, including grammar, vocabulary, their relationship to each other, and some songs. Bailey's work was pioneering: he had travelled among the hill peoples, being initiated into tribal rites and secret vocabularies, often of a criminal nature. There had been no previous publications on the grammar or philology of these dialects, merely some translated Christian texts. Bailey subsequently published a number of works on languages of the Indian subcontinent, including a history of Urdu literature.