Now in its third edition, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language provides the most comprehensive coverage of the history, structure and worldwide use of English. Fully updated and expanded, with a fresh redesigned layout, and over sixty audio resources to bring language extracts to life, it covers all aspects of the English language including the history of English, with new pages on Shakespeare's vocabulary and pronunciation, updated statistics on global English use that now cover all countries and the future of English in a post-Brexit Europe, regional and social variations, with fresh insights into the growing cultural identities of 'new Englishes', English in everyday use with new sections on gender identities, forensic studies, and 'big data' in corpus linguistics, and digital developments, including the emergence of new online varieties in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Packed with brand new colour illustrations, photographs, maps, tables and graphs, this new edition is an essential tool for a new generation of twenty-first-century English language enthusiasts.

Examines the writing systems, morphology, phonology, syntax, and lexicon of ancient languages.

Publisher description

Have you lost track of developments in generative linguistics, finding yourself unsure about the distinctive features of Minimalism? Would you like to know more about recent advances in the genetics of language, or about right hemisphere linguistic operation? Has your interest in narrative drawn you to question the relation between stories and grammars? The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences addresses these issues, along with hundreds of others. It includes basic entries for those unfamiliar with a given topic and more specific entries for those seeking more specialized knowledge. It incorporates both well-established findings and cutting-edge research and classical approaches and new theoretical innovations. The volume is aimed at readers who have an interest in some aspect of language science but wish to learn more about the broad range of ideas, findings, practices, and prospects that constitute this rapidly expanding field, a field arguably at the center of current research on the human mind and human society.

An up-to-date reference source offers more than forty thousand entries and a quick reference section of facts and figures.

Updated and expanded to 124 entries, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development remains the authoritative reference in the field.

In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way. Along the way we find out about eyebrow flashes, whistling languages, how parents teach their children to speak, how politeness travels across languages and how the way we talk show not just how old we are but where we’re from and even who we want to be.