The World's Major LanguagesBernard Comrie This volume features over fifty of the world's languages and language families. 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. This second edition has been updated and revised. Two new languages, Amharic and Javanese, have been included. This accessible volume will appeal to anyone with an interest in linguistics.Key features:Attention is paid to both grammatical and sociolinguistic featuresAttention is concentrated on the world's major languagesDesigned to be accessible to all readers with an interest in language. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
1 IndoEuropean Languages | 23 |
2 Germanic Languages | 51 |
3 English | 59 |
4 German | 86 |
5 Dutch | 110 |
6 Danish Norwegian and Swedish | 125 |
7 Latin and the Italic Languages | 145 |
28 Hungarian | 484 |
29 Finnish | 497 |
30 Turkish and the Turkic languages | 519 |
31 Afroasiatic Languages | 545 |
32 Semitic Languages | 551 |
33 Arabic | 560 |
34 Hebrew | 578 |
35 Amharic | 594 |
8 Romance Languages | 164 |
9 French | 171 |
10 Spanish | 197 |
11 Portuguese | 217 |
12 Italian | 233 |
13 Rumanian | 253 |
14 Slavonic Languages | 269 |
15 Russian | 274 |
16 Polish | 289 |
17 Czech and Slovak | 305 |
18 SerboCroat | 330 |
19 Greek | 347 |
20 IndoAryan Languages | 373 |
21 Sanskrit | 380 |
22 HindiUrdu | 399 |
23 Bengali | 417 |
24 Iranian Languages | 437 |
25 Persian | 445 |
26 Pashto | 460 |
27 Uralic languages | 477 |
36 Hausa and the Chadic Languages | 618 |
37 Tamil and the Dravidian languages | 635 |
38 Tai languages | 653 |
39 Thai | 660 |
40 Vietnamese | 677 |
41 SinoTibetan Languages | 693 |
42 Chinese | 703 |
43 Burmese | 724 |
44 Japanese | 741 |
45 Korean | 765 |
46 Austronesian Languages | 781 |
47 MalayIndonesian1 | 791 |
48 Javanese | 819 |
49 Tagalog | 833 |
50 NigerKordofanian NigerCongo languages | 857 |
51 Yoruba | 866 |
52 Swahili and the Bantu languages | 883 |
| 903 | |
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Common terms and phrases
accusative adjectives adverbial alternation Arabic auxiliary Bengali Budi Burmese century Chinese clause clitic Common Slavonic compound conjugation consonant Czech dative declension derived dialects diphthongs distinction English example feminine forms French fricative function gender genitive German grammar Greek Hebrew imperfect indicative Indo-Aryan Indo-European Indo-European languages infinitive inflectional intransitive Iranian Iranian languages Japanese Korean language Latin lexical linguistic loanwords locative marked marker masculine modern morpheme morphology nasal nominal noun phrase object obstruents occur palatalisation paradigm participle particle Pashto passive past perfect Persian phonemic phonological plural Portuguese position predicate prefix prepositions pronouns pronunciation Proto-Indo-European reduplication reference Romance Rumanian Russian Sanskrit script semantic Semitic sentence singular Slavonic Slovak speakers spoken standard stem stress subjunctive suffix syllable syntactic syntax Table Tai languages Tamil tense third person tone Tuti velar verb verbal vocabulary voiced voiceless vowel word order written