The Geography of Words
Vocabulary and Meaning in the World's Languages

An engaging celebration of global linguistic diversity, with plenty of fascinating cases of cross-linguistic variation in each chapter.

Danko Sipka (Author)

9781108841658, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 December 2021

270 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

'… Sipka adopts a playful tone and sprinkles the text with puns, wry comments, and humorous illustrations … [He] has achieved his goal and more: a book for both general readers and linguistics instructors.' Donald R. Riccomini, Society for Technical Communication

Languages around the world organize their lexicons, or vocabularies, in a myriad of different ways. This book is a celebration of global linguistic diversity, bringing together fascinating cases from a wide range of languages to explore how and why this lexical variation occurs. Each of the thirty-six short chapters shows how different culturally-specific words, relating to a range of phenomena such as kinship, colour, space, time, objects, smells, and animals, vary across languages and geographical locations. It also explains the mechanisms of development in vocabularies, showing why this variation occurs, and how languages and cultures interact, to deepen the reader's understanding of one of the most important aspects of linguistics. Assuming little to no prior knowledge of linguistics, and introducing concepts in an accessible way, this book is an entertaining, informative read for anyone who wants to learn more about the incredible variation and diversity of the human lexicon.

Introduction
Part I. How Words are Studied: A. What is a word?
B. The internal affairs of words
C. The external affairs of words
Part II. How Words are Carved Out: 1. 1 =2, 5, 6 or 7
2. Beer eyes and wine-dark sea
3. Second cousins twice removed
4. I have three sons and a child
5. Concepts on the chopping block
6. Unripe bananas and ripe tomatoes
7. Mums and clocks mean death
8. The past is in front of us and the future is behind our back
9. Far and wide, here and there
10. Bottles with throats
11. Setting the TV on fire and extinguishing it
Part III. How Things are Done with Words
12. Traduttore, traditore!
13. May you suffer and remember
14. I screw your 300 Gods
15. Either he is crazy or his feet stink
16. Shoo and scat
17. A dog and pony show
18. Blah-blah-blah, yada-yada-yada
19. Acts of darkness
20. This for that
21. Me Tarzan, you Jane
22. How many languages do you speak?
23. Harmful and shitty people
Part IV. How Words are Born: 24. Cars with tails and leadfooted drivers
25. Monkey, dog, worm, snail, i.e. 'Crazy A'
26. Rovers and ski-rolls
27. Extra crispy soccer players
28. Chinglish and Eurenglish
29. Comrade, Sir
30. Beer and whiskey mighty risky
31. SOFs and SOWs
Part V. Where Words Live: 32. Old-lady torturers, horse killers, and bad mornings
33. A fleeing bus
34. I wish that you enjoy in what you have deserved!
35. Happy hunting ground
36. A language is a dialect with an army and navy
Part VI. A Word After: Part VII. Words about Words.

Subject Areas: Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Bilingualism & multilingualism [CFDM], Sociolinguistics [CFB]