It's always a good book to start looking for something - just in case it's in the book, but the book's companionship will, however, dilute as years will pass by. No final-year bacholar or post-graduate student will find it very helpful anymore.

The is very good for A-Level students and it does convey the 'magic' and 'fascination' of linguistics and languages, but it will become too easy and shallow to help students with academic research.


fascinating   July 27, 2004
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language is a fascinating read. I have been dipping into it for several months as part of a Linguistics course but keep find myself becoming distracted by anecdotes and interesting asides. I feel that this Encyclopaedia could be enjoyed by a wide variety of readers from primary school through to university.


This book is addictive!   January 28, 2002
 19 out of 21 found this review helpful

This book was recommended to me as part of my Linguistics course at university. It has proved very useful for my course (not boring like other Linguistics books can be!), is extremely interesting and contains lots of pictures! My only complaint is that my studies take me AGES because I can't stop looking through it.


a mammoth work (in a good way!)   January 20, 2002
 18 out of 18 found this review helpful

The overwhelming effect this book leaves the reader is amazement of the scholarship of its single author, who manages to cover everything you could possibly include under the heading 'language' in a single volume. To give you some idea, the indexes and glossary of the 65 chapters information take up nearly 40 pages. Although the depth he can cover everything in is therefore limited, even in 450-odd large pages, a good proportion of what is there is absolutely fascinating and of interest to anyone who uses language (i.e. everyone).

The book makes excellent use of boxes of information and visuals in full colour such as maps, graphs and photos. Like any good encyclopaedia, it can be dipped into almost randomly with the guarantee that some interesting titbit will stick in your head. More unusually, the fact that it doesn't use an A to Z format means that it can quite easily be read through as a general introduction to linguistics. In a sense it could be just as usefully called an encyclopedia of linguistics, as it provides as much information on research and theories of language as it does on the language itself. This shouldn't be taken to mean any of this would only be of interest to the professionally interested, though. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what is going on around them, and even more so to any teacher or student of language or linguistics.


Good for more than just Language Students   October 3, 2000
 9 out of 10 found this review helpful

This book is a great refernce guide for students of Language, Sociology, Psycology and probably other subjects too. It's fresh approach and easy to use page format makes it interesting to read as a whole. From Latin and Greek to Bush Negro and Yoda this has to be the most comprehensive guide I've encountered. It explians word order and grammar using examples which will engage most students .