Hook's academic interest has been in the linguistic description of languages belonging to the
Indo-Aryan family in South Asia, and more broadly in their place in Masica's Indo-Turanian linguistic area. At Michigan, he taught
Hindi at all levels, occasionally other South Asian languages, along with courses in linguistics and South Asian literature for three and a half decades, and published on both Indo-Aryan languages and linguistics. His chief contributions are
The Compound Verb in Hindi and numerous articles on the compound verb and other syntactic and semantic phenomena in western Indo-Aryan languages and dialects spoken in
North India,
West India, and
Pakistan:
Kashmiri,
Marathi,
Gujarati,
Rajasthani,
Shina, and
Sanskrit. After
Jules Bloch in his
La Formation de la Langue Marathe, Hook was the first to realize that Kashmiri, not unlike
German, has
V2 word order. More recent publications have refined the notion of South Asia as a
linguistic area as first adumbrated by
Murray Emeneau and - with the addition of Central Asia and Eastern Asia - expanded by
Colin Masica. == Publications ==