Product Description

This second edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language presents a mass of new information and introduces the subject of language to a fresh generation of students and general readers. The first edition of the book is probably the most successful general study of language ever published. This second edition extends the range of coverage to include advances in areas like machine translation, speech interaction with machines, and language teaching. There is new material on acoustics, physiological concepts of language, and World English, and a complete update of the language distribution maps, language-speaking statistics, a table of the world’s languages, and further reading. All geopolitical material has been revised to take account of boundary changes. The book has been redesigned and is presented for the first time in full colour, with new pictures and maps added.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70964 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 488 pages

Review
‘… a celebration of language in all its oddity, beauty, fun, astonishing complexity and limitless variety.’ London Review of Books

‘The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language is a masterpeice of comprehensiveness and clarity.’ New Internationalist

‘… an ingenious tour de force … stunningly diverse linguistic menu.’ Robert Burchfield, The Times

‘… magnificently demonstrates Professor Crystal’s outstanding breadth of knowledge, incisiveness of judgment and superb skills at getting to the heart of highly complex issues in a clear and straightforward manner.’ Randolph Quirk, FBA

‘… David Crystal has a great facility for explaining language issues with plain good sense, wit and admirable brevity.’ The Times Educational Supplement

Customer Reviews

a mammoth work (in a good way!)
The overwhelming effect this book leaves the reader is amazement of the scholarship of its single author, who manages to cover everything you could possibly include under the heading 'language' in a single volume. To give you some idea, the indexes and glossary of the 65 chapters information take up nearly 40 pages. Although the depth he can cover everything in is therefore limited, even in 450-odd large pages, a good proportion of what is there is absolutely fascinating and of interest to anyone who uses language (i.e. everyone).

The book makes excellent use of boxes of information and visuals in full colour such as maps, graphs and photos. Like any good encyclopaedia, it can be dipped into almost randomly with the guarantee that some interesting titbit will stick in your head. More unusually, the fact that it doesn't use an A to Z format means that it can quite easily be read through as a general introduction to linguistics. In a sense it could be just as usefully called an encyclopedia of linguistics, as it provides as much information on research and theories of language as it does on the language itself. This shouldn't be taken to mean any of this would only be of interest to the professionally interested, though. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what is going on around them, and even more so to any teacher or student of language or linguistics.

This book is addictive!
This book was recommended to me as part of my Linguistics course at university. It has proved very useful for my course (not boring like other Linguistics books can be!), is extremely interesting and contains lots of pictures! My only complaint is that my studies take me AGES because I can't stop looking through it.

Good for more than just Language Students
This book is a great refernce guide for students of Language, Sociology, Psycology and probably other subjects too. It's fresh approach and easy to use page format makes it interesting to read as a whole. From Latin and Greek to Bush Negro and Yoda this has to be the most comprehensive guide I've encountered. It explians word order and grammar using examples which will engage most students .