Product Information:
The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the languages of China and the different ways in which they are and have been studied. It provides authoritative treatment of all important aspects of the languages spoken in China, today and in the past, from many different angles, as well as the different linguistic traditions in which they have been investigated.
In more than 500 articles, written by major specialists in the field, the Encyclopedia offers a synthesis of the most important research in Chinese linguistics and up-to-date bibliographical coverage. As such it is the prime reference source for information on:
• the lexicon, syntax, and sound structure of the Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages of China, including sign languages
• the history of languages in China and their situation today
• the history of Chinese linguistics, both indigenous and Western traditions
• the sociolinguistic situation, language contact, and language variation
• psycho- and neurolinguistic studies on Chinese, including first language acquisition
• and many other aspects of Chinese and Chinese linguistics (e.g., Chinese in the diaspora, Chinese loanwords in other languages, history of lexicography, language pedagogy, etc.).
For linguists working on Sinitic languages, the ECLL will be a useful supplement to the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (Chan 2016), though they no doubt cover some of the same ground. While that work focused on Sinitic, the scope of the ECLL is broader, covering the larger language ecology of China (broadly defined within the ECLL to include Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet). This means that the ECLL is also extremely useful to Southeast Asian linguists and goes a long way toward bridging the gap that often exists between linguistic research in the geographic regions of Southeast Asia and China. - Rikker Dockum (Yale University) in: Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 2018.
