David Crystal

A lively journey through the story of language, from an infant's first word to the languages of the internet Language never leaves you alone. It’s there in your head, helping you think. It’s there to help you make relationships – and to break them. It’s there to remind you who you are and...

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...

Preface There are many excellent introductions to linguistics already available; but it seems to me that they all presuppose a great deal of understanding on the part of a reader - and I mean 'understanding' both in the sense of 'sympathy' and of 'prior knowledge'. Many questions of a pragmatic,...