Presents an overview of the living, endangered, and extinct languages of the world, providing the total number of speakers of the language, its history, and maps of the geographic areas where it is presently spoken or where it was spoken in the past.

No ordinary dictionary, David Crystal's Dictionary of Language includes not only descriptions of hundreds of languages literally from A to Z (Abkhaz to Zyryan) and definitions of literary and grammatical concepts, but also explanations of terms used in linguistics, language teaching, and speech pathology. If you are wondering how many people speak Macedonian, Malay, or Makua, or if you're curious about various theories of the origins of language, or if you were always unsure of the difference between structuralism, semiotics, and sociolinguistics, this superbly authoritative dictionary will answer all of your questions and hundred of others.

In clear, congenial style Barry Blake explains how language works. He describes the make-up of words and how they're built from sounds and signs and put together in phrases and sentences. He examines the dynamics of conversation and the relations between the sound and meaning. He shows how languages help their users connect to each other and to the world, how they vary around the world, why they never stop changing, and that no two people speak a language in the same way. He looks at how language is acquired by infant children, how it relates to thought, and its operations in the brain. He investigates current trends and issues such as the levelling of linguistic class differences and the rise of new secret or in-group languages such as argot and teenspeak. He describes the history of writing from its origins to digital diffusion, and ends by looking at how language might have originated and then evolved among our distant hominid and primate ancestors. Language is crucial to every aspect of our lives whether we're thinking, talking, or dreaming. Barry Blake reveals the wonders that lie beneath the surface of everyday communication, enriching his exposition with a unique blend of anecdote and humour. His engaging guide is for everyone curious about language or who needs to know more about it.

A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish has been fully revised and updated, including over 500 new entries, making it an invaluable resource for students of Spanish. Based on a new web-based corpus containing more than 2 billion words collected from 21 Spanish-speaking countries, the second edition of A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish provides the most expansive and up-to-date guidelines on Spanish vocabulary. Each entry is accompanied with an illustrative example and full English translation. The Dictionary provides a rich resource for language teaching and curriculum design, while a separate CD version provides the full text in a tab-delimited format ideally suited for use by corpus and computational linguistics. With entries arranged both by frequency and alphabetically, A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish enables students of all levels to get the most out of their study of vocabulary in an engaging and efficient way.

The authors consider new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of China and East Asian languages. Based on recent debates initiated by Sheldon Pollock’s findings for South Asia, we examine alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and re-examining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why East and SE Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese) should be analysed in light of a Eurocentric dichotomy of Latin versus vernaculars. This discussion has encouraged us to explore whether European modernity is an appropriate standard at all for East Asia. Individually and collectively, we have sought to establish linkages between societies without making a priori assumptions about the countries’ internal structures or the genealogy of their connections. Contributors include: Benjamin Elman; Peter Kornicki; John Phan; Wei Shang; Haruo Shirane; Mårten Söderblom Saarela; Daniel Trambaiolo; Atsuko Ueda; Sixiang Wang.

Studying language variation requires comprehensive interdisciplinary knowledge and new computational tools. This essential reference introduces researchers and graduate students in computer science, linguistics, and NLP to the core topics in language variation and the computational methods applied to similar languages, varieties, and dialects.

There are over 6,000 languages used around the world, and linguists estimate that by 2050 half of these will have become extinct. The use of language is what fundamentally distinguishes humans from other animals: only we have developed languages of such richness and flexibility that they can be used to elucidate abstract concepts, to expose our most intimate feelings and emotions, or even to create entire worlds of imagination to entertain, amuse or inspire others. This book offers a linguistic guided world tour, looking in detail at the eleven global languages, before exploring the major languages of each region in turn. Each language entry details numbers of speakers and geographical spread, together with a a history of the growth and development of the language.

This is the new edition of Linguistics: An Introduction. It is a bestselling introductory textbook for all students of linguistics and language studies. This reworked edition features: -new chapters on sign languages, writing, and text and discourse -coverage of writing in electronic media -revised and updated chapters on languages of the world and psycholinguistics Firmly based around taught courses and catering to student needs, it addresses all the topics that a student will need in their study of language. With key terms, further reading, questions at the end of each chapter, exercises and key paragraphs in stand-out boxes, this is a firmly pedagogic text that takes difficult concepts and explains them in an easy to understand way. It features examples taken from a range of languages across the world. Global in its scope and comprehensive in its coverage, this is the textbook of choice for linguistics students. The book comes with a large Companion Website, also extensively revised and expanded. For lecturers and instructors, a comprehensive Answer Book is also available to go along with the questions throughout the chapters.