The World’s Major Languages

Description

The World's Major Languages features over 50 of the world's languages and language families. This revised edition includes updated bibliographies for each chapter and up-to-date census figures. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient features of the language's history and cultural role. The World’s Major Languages is an accessible and essential reference work for linguists. Introduction 1. Indo-European Languages 2. Germanic Languages 3. English 4. German 5. Dutch 6. Danish, Norwegian and Swedish 7. Latin and the Italic Languages 8. Romance Languages 9. French 10. Spanish 11. Portuguese 12. Italian 13. Romanian 14. Slavonic Languages 15. Russian 16. Polish 17. Czech and Slovak 18. Serbo-Croat: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian 19. Greek 20. Indo-Aryan Languages 21. Sanskrit 22. Hindi-Urdu 23. Bengali 24. Iranian Languages 25. Persian 26. Pashto 27. Uralic Languages 28. Hungarian 29. Finnish 30. Turkish and the Turkic Languages 31. Afroasiatic Languages 32. Semitic Languages 33. Arabic 34. Hebrew 35. Amharic 36. Hausa and the Chadic Languages 37. Tamil and the Dravidian Languages 38. Tai Languages 39. Thai 40. Vietnamese 41. Sino-Tibetan Languages 42. Chinese 43. Burmese 44. Japanese 45. Korean 46. Austronesian Languages 47. Malay-Indonesian 48. Javanese 49. Tagalog 50. Niger-Kordafian (Niger-Congo) Languages 51. Yoruba 52. Swahili and the Bantu Languages