World Languages: An Introduction was written for my students in a class I’ve been teaching for almost a decade. The students have come from many majors: engineering, computer science, physics, psychology, business, English, and yes, linguistics. They are novices in looking at languages as a subject to study and analyze but experts in curiosity, exploration, courage, and understanding.

My students are my inspiration along with the many guest speakers who have come to tell my classes about the languages they speak. Together we have explored languages like German, French, Arabic, and Chinese as well as Romani, Oshiwambo, Montenegrin and Macedonian, Korean, Haitian Creole, American Sign Language, Icelandic, Japanese, Hindi and Urdu, Lakota, and many others. We’ve also explored language change and dialect issues through American dialects, especially African American English. I owe a great debt to Walt Wolfram and the North Carolina Language and Life Project for information and videos on many variations of American English.

I have used a number of books through the years. I am grateful for David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language which has a wealth of information on many language topics, and Asya Pereltsvaig’s Languages of the World: An Introduction, which gives a fabulous in-depth look at many languages and the linguistic issues that they exemplify. These books and others have been extremely helpful to me in my journey with this class, but my non-linguistics students have struggled somewhat with their breadth and depth.

That, together with the intriguing notion of creating a dynamic, updatable digital publication that can take advantage of all that the internet and computers have to offer, is what inspired me to write. This book is intended to introduce students who have little experience with the field of linguistics but who are intrigued to know more about the world and language and how our understanding of diverse languages can help us be better citizens of the world.