The Five-Minute Linguist: Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages

by Barry Hilton (Editor), E.M. Rickerson (Editor)

Overview

The Five-Minute Linguist has been a popular introduction to the subject of language because it is succinct, clear, accurate - and fun to read. It is used by beginning students of linguistics, language education and anthropology, and has broad appeal for general readers, people who read for enjoyment as well as knowledge. The book started life as a series of five-minute radio broadcasts and for this reason its conversational style feels more like a series of fireside chats than a regular college textbook. Those radio broadcasts were highly acclaimed and won the 2007 Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America. The chapters are short, suitable for browsing or reading on the run. But although it is intentionally light in tone, the book is full of up-to-date information, written by more than 60 experts from around the world. This expanded second edition of the book is produced under the sponsorship of the Linguistic Society of America and the US National Museum of Language. Praise for this volume: 'An excellent, very accessible, and extremely easy- and fun-to-read introduction to some of the basic questions (and misconceptions) regarding language, language learning, and linguistics. The book clearly meets the editors' intended goals; with each essay, the reader is engaged in a five-minute, light and informal conversation about the passionate topic of language.' Linguist List 23.4805, November 2012 'This book is for anyone who has a question about languages or the nature of language-which means just about all of us. But it's not just a musty academic text for specialists. While written by leading experts on the subject of language, The Five-Minute Linguist is a user-friendly exploration of the basics, a linguistic start-up kit for general readers. It assumes nothing on your part except interest in the subject. Its bite-sized chapters (no more than 3-4 pages each) give authoritative answers to the most frequently asked questions people have about language, and tell the story in a lively and colloquial style. It is a delightful read.' From the Foreword by Bret Lovejoy, Executive Director, American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908049490
Publisher:	Equinox Publishing
Publication date:	04/30/2012
Edition description:	Revised and expanded
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

E. M. Rickerson has a Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley and is Director Emeritus of the award-winning language program at the College of Charleston (S.C.). Formerly a language program director in the U.S. government, he now consults on the development and improvement of language programs at the university level. In 2005 Dr. Rickerson created a radio series on languages ("Talkin' About Talk"), which was broadcast on public and college radio stations — and on which The Five-Minute Linguist was based. Barry Hilton is a freelance writer/editor and independent scholar living in Maine. He was a member of the editorial board that reviewed the radio scripts on which The Five-Minute Linguist was based. He has travelled and lived in both Europe and Asia, making professional use of Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, French, and German in a variety of jobs. He describes himself as an "armchair philologist and recovering polyglot."

Table of Contents

Selected chapters: Why learn about language? Robert Rodman You're a linguist? How many languages do you speak? Paul Chapin How many languages are there in the world? M. Paul Lewis What's the difference between dialects and languages? G. Tucker Childs Do all languages come from the same source? Allan Bomhard Do languages have to change? John Mc Whorter What are lingua francas? Nicholas Ostler How many kinds of writing systems are there? Peter Daniels Where does grammar come from? Joan Bybee Do all languages have the same grammar? Mark Baker How do babies learn their mother tongue? Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathryn Hirsch-Pasek Do animals use language? Donna Jo Napoli How does the brain cope with multiple languages? Henk Haarmann Does our language influence the way we think? Geoffrey Pullum What's the right way to put words together? Dennis Preston Is British English the best English? Orin Hargraves Why do people fight over language? Paul Garrett What does it mean to be bilingual? Dora Johnson How many languages can a person learn? Richard Hudson What is "speaking in tongues"? Walt Wolfram What happens if you are raised without language? Susan Curtiss Do deaf people everywhere use the same sign language? Leila Monaghan Can a threatened language be saved? Akira Yamamoto et al. What causes foreign accents? Steven Weinberger How are the sounds of language made? Peter Ladefoged Can monolingualism be cured? Katherine Sprang What does it take to learn a language well? Nina Garrett How has our thinking about language learning changed through the years? June Phillips Why study languages abroad? Sheri Spaine Long Can computers teach languages faster and better? Sue E.K. Otto What's Gullah? Elizabeth Martinez-Gibson Are U.S. dialects dying? Walt Wolfram How are dictionaries made? Erin Mc Kean Why do we need translators if we have dictionaries? Kevin Hendzel How good is machine translation? David Savignac Can you use language to solve crimes? Robert Rodman How can you keep languages in a museum? Amelia Murdoch Where did English come from? John Algeo How many Native American languages are there? Marianne Mithun Is Latin really dead? Frank Morris How different are Portuguese and Spanish? Ana Carvalho Should we be studying Russian? Benjamin Rifkin What's exciting about Icelandic? Pardee Lowe What's the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish? Neil G. Jacobs Do all Arabs speak the same language? Jerry Lampe Do you have to be a masochist to study Chinese? Barry Hilton Is studying Japanese worth the effort? Blaine Erickson What's the language of India? Vijay Gambhir Whatever happened to Esperanto? Arika Okrent and E.M. "Rick" Rickerson Does anybody here speak Klingon? Christopher Moseley