This is a short, lively, and accessible introduction to the sounds of modern English. Its emphasis on variation, with examples from British, American, New Zealand, and Singaporean English, make it suitable for both native and non-native speakers. McMahon focuses on the vowels and consonants, but also discusses syllables, stress, and the phonology of words and phrases. She introduces new tools and terminology gradually, and discusses the motivation for key concepts.

This book analyzes some differences among English, Scottish and American accents of English, and shows how they developed and why they have their current form. Although the revised version of lexical phonology presented here is intended to describe present-day patterns, it can also show how historical sound changes gave rise to these patterns.

How and why do language changes begin; how and why do they spread; and how can they ultimately be explained? This new textbook sets out to answer these questions in a clear and helpful way that will be accessible to all students with only an elementary knowledge of linguistics. In the first half of the book Dr. McMahon analyzes changes from every area of grammar. In the second she looks at such topics as language contact, linguistic variation, pidgins and Creoles, and language death. Throughout, the discussion is illustrated by a wealth of examples from English and other languages.

The contributors to this collection address issues of definition and theory of linguistic areas, analyze the process of convergence, and introduce methods to assess the impact of language contact across geographical zones. New case studies are accompanied by discussions that revisit some of the more well-established linguistic areas.

This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should classified in the future. It describes and applies computer programs from biology and evolutionary genetics to data about languages and shows how the power of the computer can be harnessed to throw light on long-standing problems in historical linguistics. It tests current theories and hypotheses, shows how new ideas can be formulated, and offers a series of demonstrations that the new techniques applied to old data can produce convincing results that are sometimes startlingly at odds...