A celebration of the huge linguistic diversity that is open to all of us at birth, and that has inspired and fascinated humans since the invention of speech.

This is the new edition of Linguistics: An Introduction. It is a bestselling introductory textbook for all students of linguistics and language studies.

This reworked edition features:

-new chapters on sign languages, writing, and text and discourse

-coverage of writing in electronic media

-revised and updated chapters on languages of the world and psycholinguistics

Firmly based around taught courses and catering to student needs, it addresses all the topics that a student will need in thei...

Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as far as cave paintings, and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite this fundamental part of human identity, little work has explored the comprehension and cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives-until now.

This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on contemporary theories from linguisti...

The second half of the book equips readers with the skills needed to undertake sociolinguistic research of their own. This is an ideal introductory text for students taking courses in sociolinguistics, language and society, language in use or language variation.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice.

Taking Emile Durkheim's concept of the 'social fact' (social ...