ABSTRACT

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.

 

chapter |22 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|9 pages

Germanic Languages

chapter 3|27 pages

English

chapter 4|25 pages

German

chapter 5|15 pages

Dutch

chapter 6|24 pages

Danish, Norwegian and Swedish

chapter 8|7 pages

Romance Languages

chapter 9|26 pages

French

chapter 10|21 pages

Spanish

chapter 11|16 pages

Portuguese

chapter 12|20 pages

Italian

chapter 13|17 pages

Romanian

chapter 14|5 pages

Slavonic Languages

chapter 15|16 pages

Russian

chapter 16|16 pages

Polish

chapter 17|25 pages

Czech and Slovak

chapter 18|18 pages

Serbo-Croat

Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian

chapter 19|26 pages

Greek

chapter 20|7 pages

Indo-Aryan Languages

chapter 21|19 pages

Sanskrit

chapter 22|18 pages

Hindi-Urdu

chapter 23|20 pages

Bengali

chapter 25|15 pages

Persian

chapter 26|26 pages

Pashto

chapter 27|5 pages

Uralic Languages

chapter 28|14 pages

Hungarian

chapter 29|21 pages

Finnish

chapter 30|26 pages

Turkish and the Turkic Languages

chapter 33|18 pages

Arabic

chapter 34|16 pages

Hebrew

chapter 35|24 pages

Amharic

chapter 36|18 pages

Hausa and the Chadic Languages

chapter 38|7 pages

Tai Languages

chapter 39|17 pages

Thai

chapter 41|8 pages

The Sino-Tibetan Languages

chapter 42|21 pages

Chinese

chapter 43|18 pages

Burmese

chapter 44|23 pages

Japanese

chapter 45|16 pages

Korean

chapter 46|10 pages

Austronesian Languages

chapter 47|29 pages

Malay-Indonesian 1

chapter 48|14 pages

Javanese

chapter 49|25 pages

Tagalog

chapter 51|17 pages

Yoruba