TheFive-MinuteLinguist

The Five-Minute Linguist

The Five-Minute Linguist: Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages (Second Edition). Edited by E.M. Rickerson, Barry Hilton. 2012. Equinox

Contents

This is a complete listing of chapters in the book:

1. Why learn about language? Robert Rodman
2. You’re a linguist? How many languages do you speak? Paul Chapin
3. How many languages are there in the world? M. Paul Lewis
4. What's the difference between dialects and languages? G. Tucker Childs
5. What was the original language? Barry Hilton
6. Do all languages come from the same source? Allan Bomhard
7. What language did Adam and Eve speak? E.M. Rickerson
8. Do languages have to change? John McWhorter
9. What are lingua francas? Nicholas Ostler
10. Isn't Pidgin English just bad English? John M. Lipski
11. How many kinds of writing systems are there? Peter T. Daniels
12. Where did writing come from? Peter T. Daniels
13. Where does grammar come from? Joan Bybee
14. Do all languages have the same grammar? Mark Baker
15. How do babies learn their mother tongue? Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathryn Hirsch-Pasek
16. Do animals use language? Donna Jo Napoli
17. How does the brain cope with multiple languages? Henk Haarmann
18. Does our language influence the way we think? Geoffrey Pullum
19. What's the right way to put words together? Dennis Preston
20. Is British English the best English? Orin Hargraves
21. Why do people fight over language? Paul Garrett
22. What does it mean to be bilingual? Dora Johnson
23. How many languages can a person learn? Richard Hudson
24. What is "speaking in tongues"? Walt Wolfram
25. What happens if you are raised without language? Susan Curtiss
26. Do deaf people everywhere use the same sign language? Leila Monaghan
27. Why do languages die? Christopher Moseley
28. Can a threatened language be saved? Akira Yamamoto et al.
29. How are the sounds of languages made? Peter Ladefoged
30. Why do American Southerners talk that way? Walt Wolfram
31. What causes foreign accents? Steven Weinberger
32. How are the sounds of language made? Peter Ladefoged
33. Can monolingualism be cured? Katherine Sprang
34. What does it take to learn a language well? Nina Garrett
35. How have our ideas about language learning changed through the years? June Phillips
36. Why study languages abroad? Sheri Spaine Long
37. Can computers teach languages faster and better? Sue E.K. Otto
38. What's the language of the United States? David Goldberg
39. Is there a language crisis in the United States? Catherine Ingold
40. What's the future of Spanish in the United States? Maria Carreira
41. What is Cajun and where did it come from? Robyn Holman
42. Did German almost become the language of the United States? Nancy P. Nenno
43. What’s Gullah? Elizabeth Martinez-Gibson
44. Are dialects dying? Walt Wolfram
45. Can you make a living loving languages? Frederick H. Jackson
46. How are dictionaries made? Erin McKean
47. Why do we need translators if we have dictionaries? Kevin Hendzel
48. How good is machine translation? David Savignac
49. Can you use language to solve crimes? Robert Rodman
50. How can you keep languages in a museum? Amelia Murdoch
51. Where did English come from? John Algeo
52. How many Native American languages are there? Marianne Mithun
53. Is Latin really dead? Frank Morris
54. Who speaks Italian? Dennis Looney
55. How different are Portuguese and Spanish? Ana Carvalho
56. Should we be studying Russian? Benjamin Rifkin
57. What's exciting about Icelandic? Pardee Lowe
58. What’s the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish? Neil G. Jacobs
59. Do all Arabs speak the same language? Jerry Lampe
60. Is Swahili the language of Africa? Don Osborn
61. Do you have to be a masochist to study Chinese? Barry Hilton
62. Is studying Japanese worth the effort? Blaine Erickson
63. What’s the language of India? Vijay Gambhir
64. Whatever happened to Esperanto? Arika Okrent and E.M. "Rick" Rickerson
65. Does anybody here speak Klingon? Christopher Moseley