xiii, 1025 pages : 24 cm

Detailed guide to the world's forty major languages with full historical, sociological, and linguistic information

From English, French, Spanish and Russian to Pashto, Tagalog, and Swahili, this is the first comprehensive reference work to provide detailed information about the world's forty major languages. Written by acknowledged specialists in the field, the volume begins with a general introduction to language and language families, followed by language-family sections that provide an informative essay about that language, and individual chapters that discuss the history, distribution, syntax, grammar and punctuation, writing and spelling systems, standards of usage, and other important aspects of each language

Includes bibliographical references and index

Introduction / Bernard Comrie -- 1. Indo-European languages / Philip Baldi -- 2. Germanic languages / John A. Hawkins -- 3. English / Edward Finegan -- 4. German / John A. Hawkins -- 5. Dutch / Jan G. Kooij -- 6. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish / Einar Haugen -- 7. Latin and Italic languages / R.G.G. Coleman -- 8. Romance languages / John N. Green -- 9. French / Martin Harris -- 10. Spanish / John N. Green -- 11. Portuguese / Stephen Parkinson -- 12. Italian / Nigel Vincent -- 13. Rumanian / Graham Mallinson -- 14. Slavonic languages / Bernard Comrie -- 15. Russian / Bernard Comrie -- 16. Polish / Gerald Stone -- 17. Czech and Slovak / David Short -- 18. Serbo-Croat / Greville Corbett -- 19. Greek / Brian D. Joseph -- 20. Indo-Aryan languages / George Cardona -- 21. Sanskrit / George Cardona -- 22. Hindi-Urdu / Yumana Kachru -- 23. Bengali / M.H. Klaiman -- 24. Iranian languages / J.R. Payne -- 25. Persian / Gernot L. Windfuhr -- 26. Pashto / D.N. Mackenzie -- 27. Uralic languages / Robert Austerlitz -- 28. Hungarian / Daniel Abondolo -- 29. Finnish / Michael Brach -- 30. Turkish and the Turkish languages / Jaklin Kornfilt -- 31. Afroasiatic languages / Robert Hetzron -- 32. Semitic languages / Robert Hetzron -- 33. Arabic / Alan S. Kaye -- 34. Hebrew / Robert Hetzron -- 35. Hausa and the Chadic languages / Paul Newman -- 36. Tamil and the Dravidian languages / Sanford B. Steever -- 37. Tai languages / David Strecker -- 38. Thai / Thomas John Hudak -- 39. Vietnamese / Dinh-Hoa Nguyen -- 40. Sino-Tibetan languages / Scott Delancey -- 41. Chinese / Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson -- 42. Burmese / Julian K. Wheatley -- 43. Japanese / Masayoshi Shibatani -- 44. Korean / Nan-Kil Kim -- 45. Austronesian languages / Ross Clark -- 46. Malay: Indonesian and Malaysian / D.J. Prentice -- 47. Tagalog / Paul Schachter -- 48. Niger-Kordofanian languages / Douglas Pulleyblank -- 49. Yoruba / Douglas Pulleyblank -- 50. Swahili and the Bantu Languages / Benji Wald -- Language Index

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