Atlas of the World's Languages

Before the first appearance of the Atlas of the World's Languages in 1993, all the world's languages had never been accurately and completely mapped. The Atlas depicts the location of every known living language, including languages on the point of extinction.

This fully revised edition of the Atlas offers:

• up-to-date research, some from fieldwork in early 2006
• a general linguistic history of each section
• an overview of the genetic relations of the languages in each section
• statistical and sociolinguistic information
• a large number of new or completely updated maps
• further reading and a bibliography for each section
• a cross-referenced language index of over 6,000 languages.

Presenting contributions from international scholars, covering over 6,000 languages and containing over 150 full-colour maps, the Atlas of the World's Languages is the definitive reference resource for every linguistic and reference library.

R.E. Asher is Emeritus Professor at the Dept of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, a world authority on Dravidian languages and author of several books, including our descriptive grammar of Malayalam and Colloquial Tamil. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi.

Christopher Moseley worked for two decades for the BBC World Service, specialising in Baltic affairs, and is now a freelance translator and editor. He has a particular interest in endangered and minority languages. He is the author of Colloquial Estonian (1994) and Colloquial Latvian (1996) and the general editor of the Routledge/Curzon Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages (2006).