Languages of the World

by

William R. Leben

Introduction

Scholarly work on the languages of the world is aimed in three main directions: genetic classification, typological classification, and documentation. This article focuses on work documenting the language families of the world, how many there are and where they are spoken, by how many speakers, and in what contexts. This article emphasizes work aimed at the scholarly community but also cites authoritative, attractive volumes and websites that target a wider audience. Included as well are a few encyclopedic works on general linguistics whose coverage of the language families of the world is so complete that it would be wrong to omit them. A few surveys aim to cover every language in the world. Other cross-linguistic surveys cover every language in a particular region, while others try for a representative sample of languages from across the globe. Works devoted to a single family or world region are not listed here; these are the subject of other articles in Oxford Bibliographies Online.

Textbooks

Lyovin 1997 is the only textbook in use on the languages of the world. After chapters on method and writing systems, the body of the book covers the language families of the world, listing many individual languages in each family. A final chapter is devoted to pidgins and creoles. Each chapter ends with exercises and a bibliography. Also included are substantive linguistic sketches of eleven languages plus nineteen maps, a language index, and a subject index.

• Lyovin, Anatole V. 1997. An introduction to the languages of the world. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

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  Nearly five hundred pages long; presupposes only basic familiarity with the fundamental concepts of linguistics.