The World's Major Languages, 3rd Edition

The World's Major Languages features over 50 of the world's languages and language families.

This revised edition includes updated bibliographies for each chapter and up-to-date census figures. 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.

The World’s Major Languages is an accessible and essential reference work for linguists.

Introduction

Chapter 1 : Indo-European Languages
Chapter 2 : Germanic Languages
Chapter 3 : English  
Chapter 4 : German  
Chapter 5 : Dutch  
Chapter 6 : Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
Chapter 7 : Latin and the Italic Languages
Chapter 8 : Romance Languages
Chapter 9 : French
Chapter 10 : Spanish
Chapter 11 : Portuguese
Chapter 12 : Italian
Chapter 13 : Romanian
Chapter 14 : Slavonic Languages
Chapter 15 : Russian
Chapter 16 : Polish
Chapter 17 : Czech and Slovak
Chapter 18 : Serbo-Croat: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian
Chapter 19 : Greek
Chapter 20 : Indo-Aryan Languages
Chapter 21 : Sanskrit
Chapter 22 : Hindi-Urdu
Chapter 23 : Bengali
Chapter 24 : Iranian Languages
Chapter 25 : Persian
Chapter 26 : Pashto
Chapter 27 : Uralic Languages
Chapter 28 : Hungarian
Chapter 29 : Finnish
Chapter 30 : Turkish and the Turkic Languages
Chapter 31 : Afroasiatic Languages
Chapter 32 : Semitic Languages
Chapter 33 : Arabic
Chapter 34 : Hebrew  
Chapter 35 : Amharic
Chapter 36 : Hausa and the Chadic Languages
Chapter 37 : Tamil and the Dravidian Languages
Chapter 38 : Tai Languages
Chapter 39 : Thai
Chapter 40 : Vietnamese  
Chapter 41 : Sino-Tibetan Languages
Chapter 42 : Chinese  
Chapter 43 : Burmese
Chapter 44 : Japanese
Chapter 45 : Korean
Chapter 46 : Austronesian Languages
Chapter 47 : Malay-Indonesian
Chapter 48 : Javanese
Chapter 49 : Tagalog  
Chapter 50 : Niger-Kordafian (Niger-Congo) Languages
Chapter 51 : Yoruba  
Chapter 52 : Swahili and the Bantu Languages