Linguistics

This third edition of Compendium of the World's Languages has been thoroughly revised to provide up-to-date and accurate descriptions of a wide selection of natural language systems. Scholarly, comprehensive and highly accessible.

This volume features over 50 of the world's languages and language families chosen by the number of speakers, their role as official languages, and their cultural and historical importance. Chapters provide information on both grammatical features and language's history and cultural role.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of current research in African languages, drawing on insights from anthropological linguistics, typology, historical and comparative linguistics and sociolinguistics. Africa is believed to host at least one third of the world's languages, usually classified into four phyla - Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan - which are then subdivided into further families and subgroupings.

The languages of Western Asia belong to a variety of language families, including Indo-European, Kartvelian, Semitic and Turkic, but share numerous features on account of being in areal contact over many centuries. This volume presents descriptions of the modern languages and evaluates similarities across the languages that may have arisen by areal contact.

First published in 1982, Languages of South Asia covers all important languages and language groups of the so-called Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan). It concentrates on the more southern languages, that is the Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda groups; a brief survey of Tibeto-Burman languages is also included.

This book provides a rich and comprehensive survey of the history and core systems of the languages of this fascinating region. Enfield includes numerous data examples from over 100 languages from Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. Chapters cover the many ways in which these languages both resemble and differ from each other, with a special emphasis on minority languages, which outnumber the national languages by nearly 100:1.

This book is part of a multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The book supplies profiles of the language families of Europe, including the sign languages. It also discusses the areal typology, paying attention to the Standard Average European, Balkan, Baltic and Mediterranean convergence areas. Separate chapters deal with the old and new minority languages and with non-standard varieties.

This book is designed to serve as a reference work and in-depth introduction to Austronesian languages, providing a source of basic information for linguists and other professionals concerned with this area.

This comprehensive volume presents grammatical analyses of individual Bantu languages, comparative studies of their main phonetic, phonological and grammatical characteristics and overview chapters on their history and classification.

This second edition has been thoroughly revised to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the modern Celtic languages and their current sociolinguistic status along with complete descriptions of the historical languages.

This authoritative reference source provides a unique description of Dravidian languages, covering their grammatical structure and historical development, plus sociolinguistic features. New to this edition are chapters on Beṭṭa Kur̲umba, Kuṛux, Kūvi and Malayāḷam.

This volume provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German, to Faroese and Yiddish.

Each chapter on the individual languages in this volume covers the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.

This comprehensive, single-volume tome presents in-depth discussions on the historical development and specialized linguistic features of the individual languages and language subgroups within the Indo-European language family.

Drawing together a distinguished group of international experts, with much of the material taken from data collected by the authors' own field work, this volume presents descriptive, typological, historical-comparative and sociolinguistic material on Khoesan.

The Languages of Japan and Korea provides detailed descriptions of the major varieties of languages in the region, both modern and pre-modern, within a common format, producing a long-needed introductory reference source.

The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200-900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras.

This volume is the first comprehensive treatment of the Mongolic languages in English, written by an international team of specialists. For general linguistic theory, the Mongolic languages offer interesting insights to problems of areal typology and structural change.

This new volume presents an overview of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian languages, spread across a region embracing eastern Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. It provides sufficient phonological and grammatical data to give typologists and comparativists a good idea of the nature of these languages.

Comprehensive offering with a detailed structural examination of all individual Romance varieties and Romance-speaking areas, including standard, non-standard, dialectal and regional varieties of the Old and New Worlds.

The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms. This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material.

Now in its second edition and fully updated to include new research, The Sino-Tibetan Languages includes overview articles on individual languages, with an emphasis on the less commonly described languages, as well as descriptions and comments on the subgroups in which they occur.

Providing chapter-length descriptions of each of the modern Slavonic languages, as well as the extinct ones, this book describes their social context, phonology, sychronic morphology, vocabulary and syntactic properties.

Provides a unique, comprehensive, single-volume tome covering much needed grammatical descriptions of Tai-Kadai languages such as Thai and Lao.

The Turkic Languages is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family. This thoroughly revised edition reflects ongoing developments in the languages themselves and our enhanced understanding of relations and patterns of influence between them.

This book provides a unique, up-to-date survey of individual Uralic languages and sub-groupings from Finnish to Selkup. The 18 language chapters are similarly structured and designed for comparative study.

This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches, featuring major language families and isolates, and topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation and revitalization.

In South America, there are over 100 language families. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these Indigenous languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. Based on a large-scale database of features from 60 languages, the book analyses major language families such as Tupian and Arawakan, Quechua/Aymara complex, the Isthmo-Colombian region and the Andean foothills.

This handbook surveys the Indigenous languages of Asia's North Pacific Rim, Siberia and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region's widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as isolates spoken by surviving hunter-gatherers.