A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (review)

Every five or six years since 1980, the world of linguistics has come to expect a new edition of this volume. This latest incarnation, which is double the size of the original version, now includes more than 5,000 terms which are incorporated into over 3,000 entries. What has not changed, according to the author, is that like the four previous editions, the book is aimed at the same groups of potential users, namely ‘the range of teaching and remedial language professions, such as foreign-language teaching or speech and language therapy; and the range of academic fields which study language as part of their concerns, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, literary criticism and philosophy’; and, of course, ‘an increasing number of students of linguistics’ (vii).

This latest edition has a brand new look, inside and out. The size of the book has been increased by almost two cm., and the presentation has been modified in various ways. A significant improvement in this area is the drastic toning down of the rather distracting heavy boldface type which Crystal has always made such liberal use of both in the head-words, which are often expressions or phrases, and elsewhere in the entries. Another is the wise decision to have ‘dropped the convention (which some readers found confusing) of including inflectional variants immediately after the headword; these are now included in bold within an entry, on their first mention’ (x). For example, a fourth edition headword like ‘glottal(-ic, -ize, -ization, glottis)’ is now simply glottal (adj.) with the derivatives glottis, glottal stop, glottalization, glottalic, glottalized, and glottal constrictions appearing at various points in the entry. The impression of clutter that the previous editions often projected has been all but eliminated as a result of these changes.

In terms of content, everything preceding the dictionary entries is new. Thus, the four short prefaces which appeared in the preceding edition, that is, the ones from 1980, 1985, 1991, and 1997, have been replaced by a lengthier ‘Preface to the fifth edition’. In addition, a nine-page ‘List of abbreviations’ and a three-page ‘List of symbols’ have been added, and the latest IPA chart (revised to 1993) now appears instead of the previous (1989) version. Changes in the entries themselves are basically of two kinds: Some are totally new, for example, bandwidth, faithfulness (FAITH), antiformant, factorial typology, endangered language, to name just a few, while others have been extended to various degrees, for example, optimality theory, which is now more than double its original length.

There is little doubt that this is the most up-to-date, complete, and reasonably priced linguistics dictionary on the market at the present time. In comparison, Hadumod Bussmann’s Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics (London: Routledge, 1996) and its 1999 (unrevised) paperback version are much more expensive and obviously not as current, nor do they have as many entries. As for R. L. Trask’s excellent A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics (London: Routledge, 1993) and A dictionary of phonetics and phonology (London: Routledge, 1996), not only are they obviously in need of revision, but together they include some 1,500 fewer terms while costing almost twice as much. In sum, with the advent of this latest edition, C’s A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics can rightly be called an institution, and one that promises to be around for years to come.