What precisely are structuralism, semiotics and sociolinguistics? What distinguishes pidgins from creoles, gerunds from gerundives and the hard palate from the soft palate? How many people speak Macedonian, Malay or Makua? Now it is second edition, David Crystal`s superbly authoritative dictionary provides answers to all these questions and to many hundreds of others concerned with language and linguistics.

Key features include:
* Major new edition, with fully updated data and statistics, and new entries on the critical issues of ecolinguistics, endangered languages and human linguistic rights
* succinct descriptions of many hundred of languages
* clear definitions of grammatical and literary concepts
* full coverage of the terminology used in such disciplines as language teaching and learning speech disorders and stylistics
* over sixty diagrams and cartoons