Customer Reviews
Good Linguistics A-Level Book - By: , 25 Jan 2005 
David Crystal's encyclopedia is probably one of the biggest referencesin A-Level English Studies & it will prove to be a good companion to anyone doing Linguistics or English Language.
It's always a good book to start looking for something - justin case it'sin 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 & it does convey the 'magic' & 'fascination' of linguistics & languages, but it will become too easy & shallow to help students with academic research.
fascinating - By: Bean74, 27 Jul 2004 
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 & 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! - By: , 28 Jan 2002 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 & 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!) - By: , 20 Jan 2002 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 & glossary of the 65 chapters information take up nearly 40 pages. Although the depth he can cover everythingin is therefore limited, evenin 450-odd large pages, a good proportion of what is there is absolutely fascinating & of interest to anyone who uses language (i.e. everyone).
The book makes excellent use of boxes of information & visualsin full colour such as maps, graphs & photos. Like any good encyclopaedia, it can be dipped into almost randomly with the guarantee that some interesting titbit will stickin 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 & 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 interestedin what is going on around them, & even more so to any teacher or student of language or linguistics.
Good for more than just Language Students - By: , 03 Oct 2000 
This book is a great refernce guide for students of Language, Sociology, Psycology & probably other subjects too. It's fresh approach & easy to use page format makes it interesting to read as a whole. From Latin & Greek to Bush Negro & Yoda this has to be the most comprehensive guide I've encountered. It explians word order & grammar using examples which will engage most students .
