Provides the basic facts about the world's major families of spoken languages and their distribution around the globe

Relates to some of the big social issues facing the world today, such as bio-diversity and the endangerment of species and cultures

Looks at the reasons behind why languages are declining, and why this really matters

Raises the question about how we identify a language, and considers how we differentiate a 'language' from a 'dialect'

Looks at signed languages and considers the similarities and differences to spoken language

Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series - over five million copies sold worldwide

How many languages are there? What differentiates one language from another? Are new languages still being discovered? Why are so many languages disappearing?

The diversity of languages today is varied, but it is steadily declining. In this Very Short Introduction, Stephen Anderson answers the above questions by looking at the science behind languages. Considering a wide range of different languages and linguistic examples, he demonstrates how languages are not uniformly distributed around the world; just as some places are more diverse than others in terms of plants and animal species, the same goes for the distribution of languages.

Exploring the basis for linguistic classification and raising questions about how we identify a language, as well as considering signed languages as well as spoken, Anderson examines the wider social issues of losing languages, and their impact in terms of the endangerment of cultures and peoples.

Readership: General readers with no background in linguistics, including students on introductory courses in language and linguistics.