An Introduction to the Languages of the World - Softcover

Lyovin, Anatole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195149882 ISBN 13: 9780195149883

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Unique in scope, An Introduction to the Languages of the World introduces linguistics students to the variety of world's languages. Students will gain familiarity with concepts such as sound change, lexical borrowing, diglossia, and language diffusion, and the rich variety of linguistic structure in word order, morphological types, grammatical relations, gender, inflection, and derivation. It offers the opportunity to explore structures of varying and fascinating languages even with no prior acquaintance. A chapter is devoted to each of the world's continents, with in-depth analyses of representative languages of Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America, and separate chapters cover writing systems and pidgins and creoles. Each chapter contains exercises and recommendations for further reading. New to this edition are eleven original maps as well as sections on sign languages and language death and revitalization. For greater readability, basic language facts are now organized in tables, and language samples follow international standards for phonetic transcription and word-by-word glossing.

There is an instructor's manual available for registered instructors on the book's companion website.

About this title

About the Author

Anatole Lyovin is retired Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Brett Kessler is Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.

William Leben is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Stanford University.

Review

"This book is an important pedagogical resource, presenting in succinct form information on the classification of the world's languages into language families and on the major structural types with regard to a wide range of phonological, morphological, and syntactic phenomena, as well as detailed presentations of languages selected to illustrate interaction of structural features as they occur in texts." --Bernard Comrie, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara

"The second edition of An Introduction to the Languages of the World is a leap forward. I welcome the chapter on writing systems and the language sketches. The book stresses the diversity of the world's languages and is well balanced across the globe. The decision to use ISO coding for language names, now the standard nomenclature for languages, is also welcome. Altogether, a fine achievement." --Mark Aronoff, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, Stony Brook University

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0195149882
• ISBN 13: 9780195149883
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 544