concerned with the immense variety among the languages of the world, as well as the
common traits that cut across the differences. The book presents a number of analytic
tools for comparing and contrasting different languages, and for seeing any one
particular language in a larger linguistic perspective.
The book attempts to avoid eurocentrism, the excessive focus on European
languages often found in introductions to linguistics. Although, for ease of
presentation, examples are often drawn from English, a large variety of languages
from all continents are drawn into the discussion whenever this helps to broaden our
perspective.
This global focus is reflected in the choice of topics. Apart from a chapter
introducing the four traditional branches of linguistics (semantics, syntax,
morphology and phonology), this book is primarily interested in the following
seemingly simple questions:
1. How and why do languages resemble each other?
2. How and why do languages differ from each other?
These questions are dealt with, from different angles, in the chapters on language
universals, linguistic typology, language families and language contact. The chapter
on language variation moves the focus from inter-language to intra-language
comparison. Finally, the chapter on writing discusses similarities and differences in
the ways in which various cultures have used a visual medium to represent and
augment the auditory signals of speech.
The book is primarily concerned with natural languages that function as fullfledged
mother tongues for larger or smaller groups of people. It is less concerned
with the clearly artificial and highly restricted languages of, for instance,
mathematics, formal logic or computer programming. The line of division is not
always clear. While the word one belongs to English, the number 1 belongs to
mathematics; and while the words if and then belong to English, the logical operator
if-then belongs to formal logic and computer programming.
At the heart of our concern lies the spoken language. All natural languages
are spoken, while to this day many of them have no written form. Unlike most
textbooks in linguistics, however, this book will also devote a whole chapter to
writing, which may be seen as an extension of speech. On the other hand, it will have
little to say about forms of language that are based on gestures rather than speech,
such as body language or the sign languages of the deaf.