International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (review)

The first edition of the International Encyclopedia, also in four volumes, appeared in 1992. Both editions offer extensive bibliographies for the longer entries, and are far more authoritative, ambitious, and comprehensive than their competitors in English. Description rather than historiography or statistics predominates. The encyclopedia’s inventory of the world’s thousands of languages and the estimated number of speakers of each is an amazing collective achievement, although the information given concerning the individual major languages and language groups is usually too selective and cursory to aid SLA (second language acquisition), or literary and cultural studies.