A Dictionary of the World's Languages: With Tables of Language Families (review)

Born in Spain and educated at Stanford University, the author taught Spanish in Taiwan for many years. The intent of the Dictionary of the world’s languages is perhaps expressed in an anecdote in the preface: ‘Just recently, a scientist who has traveled around the world … asked me for some bibliographical material about the Bambara language … in order to gather some more information about the language of the children she plans to adopt …. Then, I truly realize the fruitfulness of this brief dictionary’ (vii–viii). But the corresponding entry is: ‘Bambara (also Bamana): A Mande language of the Bambara people, spoken mainly in Mali and some adjoining areas in the south and west. It is widely used as a trade language by about two million people. See Mande, Niger-Congo’ (20). This is fuller than most entries, which have nothing corresponding to the second sentence; and no bibliography is given under any entry.

Some 2,500 entries cover names of languages, families, and phyla (‘long-ranger’ proposals are included, usually marked as not accepted by the majority of linguists), as well as terms like creole, dialect, sign language, and trade language. Coverage seems fairly full for South America, Eurasia, and Austronesia (though of the eight Austronesian languages of Taiwan, only Ami is mentioned), and less full for Africa and North America. Many ancient languages appear (including Hurrian but not its sole relative Urartian); despite renowned recent grammars of Slave and Dyirbal, neither is found—indeed, all of Australia is omitted (but Tasmanian gets an entry, with a cross-reference to Indo-Pacific, which, however, merely says ‘see Papuan’ (94), where Tasmanian, properly, does not occur). Occasional mistakes, such as separate entries for Galla and Gallinya, are offset by interesting juxtapositions like ‘Coto: The Tucano language of the Indian Coto people, a Tucano people of eastern Ecuador. Coto: The Chibchan language of the Coto people, an Indian Chibchan people of Costa Rica, Central America’ (51)—but neither name is confirmed either by Ethnologue (14th edn., Dallas: SIL International, 2003) or by Terence Kaufman in Atlas of the world’s languages (ed. by Christopher Moseley and R. E. Asher, London: Routledge, 1993).

There are far too many typographic errors (and the alphabetization is sometimes shaky), and they particularly mar the seventeen tables of language families (267–93), which display the (single) ‘Cuacasian [sic] family’ with branches Southern, Western, Eastern, and Dagestan (273), the ‘Altalic [sic] family’ (275), and the ‘Non-Khmer family’ (277, absent the other half of Austroasiatic, Munda, which is properly treated in the entries); while Miao-Yao and doubtfully Tai are included within Sino-Tibetan (276). ‘The top 12 languages of the world’ (by population) follow (294–95), as well as a brief bibliography including most of the useful compendia of languages of the world (297–301).

There is nothing in this volume that cannot be found in the two volumes of Ethnologue or its convenient website http://www.ethnologue.com, and satisfyingly fuller treatments (of fewer languages) can be found in Dictionary of languages by Andrew Dalby (1998; cf. my review in Language in Society 29.470–72 (2000)).