This is the third edition of the concise dictionary of linguistics published by Oxford University Press. It comes 7 years after the previous edition (2007) (RR 2008/127) and 17 years after the original (1997). The publication of a revised edition demonstrates that this type of work is in demand and brings it up-to-date with a number of changes in the field. The cover looks suitably academic and stylish and is a big improvement over the second-edition paperback which had some rather alarming faces on the cover.
The editor, Peter Matthews, is well-respected and an established expert in his field. He is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He has a long list of publications in this field, including The Positions of Adjectives in English (Matthews, in press).
The dictionary runs from A to Zyryan (another name for Komi, the main Finno-Ugric language in the region of the Urals in case you were wondering!). Altogether there are 3,250 entries spanning grammar, phonetics, semantics, languages (spoken and written), dialects and sociolinguistics, and the dictionary “also incorporates entries on key scholars of linguistics, both ancient and modern”. The publisher markets this dictionary as covering every aspect of its wide-ranging field, but this is not entirely true, as the editor himself explains that a number of topics have been left out. This is not a major criticism, as in a work of this kind, it is impossible to include everything.
The editor provides an interesting introduction explaining his reasoning when compiling the dictionary. For example, computational linguistics is not included, as it is “increasingly a part of computer science” and, similarly, methods in language teaching (part of applied linguistics) is no longer considered a core topic. He freely admits he has had to make difficult decisions, in fact in the acknowledgments, he thanks his wife for her encouragement when the project was “driving me round the bend!”. If your area of interest is phonetics, you might find this dictionary is not the most suitable, as Matthews states in the introduction that “the need to cut corners was most pressing in some areas of phonetics”. The book also omits the International Phonetic Alphabet. A comparable work which does include phonetics is A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (Crystal, 2008) (RR 2009/223); this has a similar number of entries and again has a wide coverage of the fields of linguistics.
In the introduction, Matthews helpfully explains the stylistic conventions he has used, for example an asterisk to point to related entries. Pronunciations are provided only when he thought it necessary, which makes sense in a concise dictionary. Each entry has the term in bold followed by a brief, clear definition. The editor makes use of examples and compare/see also to explain terms. There are occasional diagrams where appropriate. A directory of symbols used throughout the dictionary is provided. The text is fairly small to keep the size of the book down and it is still readable, but I do wonder whether the format will continue to be sustainable. For the second edition, the topic of sociolinguistics was added, bringing the total to 3,150 entries. The third edition has had 100 new entries added, expanding its coverage of semantics and other recently emerging terminology. If this trend continues, it will be hard to continue marketing it as concise!
The book's website states that the suggested readership is “students at A-level or above studying linguistics, English linguistics, language, and related topics”. I would agree that students of linguistics would find this dictionary illuminating; however, I think the publisher's claims are too broad, as they also say it is suitable for general readers interested in languages and the theory of language. As the book consists of brief definitions rather than detailed explanations and the entries lack context, it may be less useful for general readers. Another book by Peter Matthews, Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction (Matthews, 2003), would be more helpful as an introduction to linguistics.
The dictionary is available online at: www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199675128.001.0001/acref-9780199675128?rskey=LrlnjD&result=2, although a subscription is required. The web links to helpful organizations and websites at the back of the book are also available online at: http://global.oup.com/booksites/content/9780199675128/links/
