The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language - Tapa dura

'... 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

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.