Each volume in this series contains an in-depth account of the members of some of the world's most important language families. Written by experts in each language, these accessible accounts provide detailed linguistic analysis and description. The contents are carefully structured to cover the natural system of classification: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, semantics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics.
Every volume contains extensive bibliographies for each language, a detailed index and tables, and maps and examples from the languages to demonstrate the linguistic features being described. The consistent format allows comparative study, not only between the languages in each volume, but also across all the volumes in the series.
Edited
By Daniel Abondolo, Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi
March 31, 2023
The Uralic Languages, second edition, is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Uralic family. The Uralic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching ...
Edited
By Lars Johanson, Éva Á. Csató
December 28, 2021
The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from southern Iran to the Arctic Ocean and from the Balkans to the great wall of China. There are currently 20 literary languages in the group, the most important among them being Turkish with over 70 million speakers; ...
Edited
By Sanford B. Steever
December 16, 2019
The Dravidian language family is the world's fourth largest with nearly 250 million speakers across South Asia from Pakistan to Nepal, from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka. This authoritative reference source provides a unique description of the languages, covering their grammatical structure and ...
Edited
By John Huehnergard, Na’ama Pat-El
March 26, 2019
The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms. This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material. New ...
Edited
By Mark Van de Velde, Koen Bostoen, Derek Nurse, Gérard Philippson
February 11, 2019
Written by an international team of experts, this comprehensive volume presents grammatical analyses of individual Bantu languages, comparative studies of their main phonetic, phonological and grammatical characteristics and overview chapters on their history and classification. It is estimated ...
Edited
By Lyle Campbell
September 25, 2017
Language Isolates explores this fascinating group of languages that surprisingly comprise a third of the world’s languages. Individual chapters written by experts on these languages examine the world's major language isolates by geographic regions, with up-to-date descriptions of many, including ...
Edited
By John Lynch, Malcolm Ross, Terry Crowley
July 28, 2017
The Oceanic Languages form a closed subgroup within one of the world’s largest language families, Austronesian. There are between 1000 and 1500 Austronesian languages (estimates vary), with so much structural diversity that they are best handled in two volumes, one on the Oceanic and one on the ...
Edited
By Juha Janhunen
July 27, 2017
The Mongolic Languages represents the first comprehensive treatment of the Mongolic language family in English. The Mongolic languages form a linguistically well defined but geographically widely dispersed family of more than a dozen separate languages, distributed from East and North Asia (...
Edited
By Nicolas Tranter
May 24, 2017
The Languages of Japan and Korea provides detailed descriptions of the major varieties of languages in the region, both modern and pre-modern, within a common format, producing a long-needed introductory reference source. Korean, Japanese, Ainu, and representative members of the main groupings of ...
Edited
By Judith Aissen, Nora C. England, Roberto Zavala Maldonado
May 18, 2017
The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique ...
Edited
By Mate Kapović
January 09, 2017
The Indo-European Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language subgroups within this language family. With over four hundred languages and dialects and almost three billion native speakers, the Indo-European language family is the largest of the recognized ...
Edited
By Graham Thurgood, Randy J. LaPolla
December 08, 2016
There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Our records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them has multiplied in the last few decades. Now in its second edition and fully...
