Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World (Concise Encyclopedias of Language and Linguistics)

Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World is an authoritative single-volume reference resource comprehensively describing the major languages and language families of the world. It will provide full descriptions of the phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax of the world’s major languages, giving insights into their structure, history and development, sounds, meaning, structure, and language family, thereby both highlighting their diversity for comparative study, and contextualizing them according to their genetic relationships and regional distribution.Based on the highly acclaimed and award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, this volume will provide an edited collection of almost 400 articles throughout which a representative subset of the world's major languages are unfolded and explained in up-to-date terminology and authoritative interpretation, by the leading scholars in linguistics. In highlighting the diversity of the world’s languages ― from the thriving to the endangered and extinct ― this work will be the first point of call to any language expert interested in this huge area. No other single volume will match the extent of language coverage or the authority of the contributors of Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World.

• Extraordinary breadth of coverage: a comprehensive selection of just under 400 articles covering the world's major languages, language families, and classification structures, issues and dispute
• Peerless quality: based on 20 years of academic development on two editions of the leading reference resource in linguistics, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics
• Unique authorship: 350 of the world's leading experts brought together for one purpose
• Exceptional editorial selection, review and validation process: Keith Brown and Sarah Ogilvie act as first-tier guarantors for article quality and coverage
• Compact and affordable: one-volume format makes this suitable for personal study at any institution interested in areal, descriptive, or comparative language study - and at a fraction of the cost of the full encyclopedia

Read English at Cambridge, joined the British Council and worked in Uganda. He then taught at the University College of Cape Coast in Ghana before moving to Edinburgh, where he took his PhD in linguistics and subsequently taught in the Department of Linguistics. In 1984 he moved to the University of Essex, where he was Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics, and then to the University of Cambridge where he was Senior Research Fellow in the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics. He is now an Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Heidelberg, Vienna and Düsseldorf. From 1990-94 he was President of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, and has been a member of Council of the Philological Society since 1998. He is Chairman of the linguistics committee of the Subject Centre for Languages Linguistics and Area Studies. He is co-editor of Transactions of the Philological Society and sits on other editorial boards. He is author of Linguistics Today (Fontana 1984) and co-author, with Jim Miller, of Syntax: A Linguistic Introduction to Sentence Structure and Syntax: Generative Grammar (Hutchinson 1981). He was syntax editor for the 1st edition of The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics and was joint editor, with Jim Miller of A Concise Encyclopedia of Linguistic Theories and A Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories (Pergamon Press 1997 & 1998). He was joint editor of Common Denominators in Art and Science (Aberdeen University Press, 1983) and Language, Reasoning and Inference (Academic Press, 1986).

Sarah Ogilvie, Trinity College, Oxford, is a linguist and lexicographer who specializes in words that enter English from the languages of the world. She is a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was Etymologies Editor for the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (6th ed., 2007), and was section editor for the ‘Languages of the World’ section in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed., Elsevier, 2006)