The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics is online

Rome [ENA] Since its foundation in 1683, Brill, a publishing house in Leiden, has at its core been a humanities publishing house. For linguists working on Sinitic languages, Brill recently published online the Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. It is intended as a useful complement to the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (Chan 2016), though they undoubtedly cover some of the same ground.

While that work focused on Sinitic, the scope of the Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics is wide-ranging, covering the larger language ecosystem of China (generally defined within the Encyclopedia to include Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet). So, it is extremely useful to Southeast Asian linguists and goes a long way toward connecting also linguistic research in the geographic regions of Southeast Asia and China. It is possible without hesitation to confirm this is a superb work for all interested in linguistics and China.

It is authoritative and considers all important aspects of the languages spoken in China, today and in the past, from many different approaches, as well as the different linguistic traditions in which they have been investigated. The Editor-in-Chief is Rint Sybesma, Professor of Chinese Linguistics in Leiden and teamwork has been fulfilled by an impressive staff of scholars: Wolfgang BEHR who is the Traditional China Chair at the University of Zurich (2008), where he is also Director of the University Priority Research Program "Asia and Europe", Yueguo GU is Research Professor and the Director of Corpus and Computational Linguistics Research Centre in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zev HANDEL Associate Professor in the Department

of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle, C.-T. James HUANG is Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. James MYERS is Professor of Linguistics at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. In more than 500 articles, written by major specialists in the field, the Encyclopedia offers a synthesis of the most important research in Chinese linguistics and up-to-date bibliographical coverage. As such it is the prime reference source for information on:

• the lexicon, syntax, and sound structure of the Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages of China, including sign languages • the history of languages in China and their situation today • the history of Chinese linguistics, both indigenous and Western traditions • the sociolinguistic situation, language contact, and language variation • psycho- and neurolinguistic studies on Chinese, including first language acquisition • and many other aspects of Chinese and Chinese linguistics (e.g., Chinese in the diaspora, Chinese loanwords in other languages, history of lexicography, language pedagogy, etc.).

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics edited by Brill offers a methodical and comprehensive synopsis of the languages of China and the different ways in which they are and have been studied.