The Penguin Dictionary of Language [antikvár]

PREFACE The motivation for this book came from my sense of an increasing gap between the questions about language which people routinely ask and the availability of information in existing reference books on the subject. Typical of these questions are 'How many people speak Spanish?', 'What language do they speak in Ukraine?', and 'How do you pronounce Xhosa?'. In preparing the first edition, in 1991-2, I recall being asked about the meaning of such terms as Nostratic, LINC, dyslexia, glossolalia, and creóle. Looking for a convenient one-stop source which would quickly give a basic answer to such questions, I was surprised to find nothing. A good dictionary might provide a basic definition, but usually in a highly compressed manner, and without the amplification which many of these terms need if one is to be sure of their use. An encyclopedia, on the other hand, tends to exclude terminology. My own previous writing in this domain was not much help. My Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language covered the right domain, but its thematic structure meant that information on a particular topic (such as Polish) was spread in various places, and pronunciations were not given. My Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics was alphabetical, but focused exclusively on the more specialized vocabulary found in those subjects. It explicitly excluded the linguistic terminology of such areas as language teaching and learning, speech therapy, stylistics, desk-top publishing, philology, traditional grammar, writing systems, language names, and the many everyday notions which relate to the use of language. The present book tries to combine the convenience of the alphabetical dictionary with the general range of the thematic encyclopedia. It focuses on the more popular and relevant concepts to do with language, but I have taken into account the more systematic kinds of enquiry which are likely to accompany the contemporary increased focus on language, in such areas as the British National Curriculum. I have also introduced an 'interface' with linguistics, including several basic theoretical notions, the names of a number of linguistic branches, models, and theories, and the essential descriptive terms in phonetics. For the second edition, I have completely revised the geolinguistic data in the book, updating the population statistics on individual countries to the mid-1990s, and taking into account the results of the latest surveys about numbers of speakers. Several entries have had to be fundamentally revised, in the light of the political changes of the early 1990s - notably the countries and languages which were previously grouped under Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and those countries which have adopted new constitutions affecting language (as in South Africa) or new