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| List of maps | |
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| List of figures and tables | |
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| Preface | |
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| Before history | |
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| Unwritten languages | |
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| When did languages come into being? | |
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| Forty thousand or two million years? | |
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| What was the reason? | |
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| Languages of gatherers and hunters | |
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| Were languages then just like languages now? | |
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| Vocabulary and society | |
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| How many Khoisan languages are there? | |
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| 'What language do you speak?' 'Don't know.' | |
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| The many languages of Australia | |
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| What is a language? | |
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| How many languages existed twelve thousand years ago? | |
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| The large language groups | |
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| Societal and linguistic changes | |
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| Germanic, Slavic, Romance | |
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| Indo-European languages | |
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| Bantu languages | |
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| What is a Bantu language like? | |
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| Other language groups | |
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| How language groups were formed | |
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| Further reading, review questions, etc. | |
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| The basis of history | |
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| History and writing | |
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| Hieroglyphs and Egyptian | |
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| River valleys and states | |
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| The state, the language, and the script | |
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| Hieroglyphs | |
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| Chinese�the oldest survivor | |
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| Writing in another way | |
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| Culture and states | |
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| The large state | |
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| Unity and splits | |
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| Devouring other languages | |
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| Neighbours | |
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| Writing and society | |
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| Further reading, review questions, etc. | |
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| Language expansions | |
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| Greek�conquest and culture | |
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| Language and alphabet | |
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| Language as creation | |
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| Are languages equal? | |
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| Alphabet and dialect | |
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| From city states to empire | |
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| The New Greek | |
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| Learning from the Greeks | |
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| Latin�conquest and order | |
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| Empire and language | |
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| Language shift and language extinction | |
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| Latin as an international language | |
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| The influence of Latin | |
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| Arabic�conquest and religion | |
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| Invasion and languages | |
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| Arabic as a language of high culture | |
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| Decline, splits, and dialects | |
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| One language or many? | |
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| Further reading, review questions, etc. | |
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| Languages and nations | |
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| Did Dante write in Italian? | |
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| How languages become languages | |
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| Latin and French | |
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| Oc, oil, and si | |
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| Written language and language name | |
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| From Germanic to Modern English | |
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| How English came to Britain | |
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| Germani, Angles, Saxons | |
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| The language of the Angles and Saxons | |
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| Runes in Britain | |
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| The Roman script and English | |
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| The first centuries of English literature | |
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| Bede, Latin, and English | |
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| King Alfred and West Saxon | |
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| Normans and French | |
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| The transformation of English | |
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| The new standard | |
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| Nation state and national language | |
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| The era of national languages | |
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| State, school, and languages | |
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| National languages and national poets | |
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| Language and politics | |
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| The language competition | |
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| Further reading, review questions etc. | |
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| Europe and the world | |
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| Languages of Europe and of the world | |
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| Portuguese in the West | |
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| America�a continent with three languages | |
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| Portugal and the rest of the world | |
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| English overseas | |
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| What happened? | |
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| How languages are born�or made | |
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| Slave trade, language mutilation, and language birth | |
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| Are Creoles languages? | |
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| The remarkable similarities | |
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| Creole languages and language change | |
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| Afrikaans�Germanic and African | |
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| Afrikaans�dialect or Creole language? | |
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| Norwegian�one language or two? | |
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| How spoken language becomes written language�or vice versa | |
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| How languages come into being | |
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| How languages disappear | |
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| Death of a language | |
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| The languages without a future | |
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| The realignment of dialects | |
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| What will be left? | |
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| How languages disappear | |
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| Shiyeyi and Thimbukushu | |
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| The disappearance of languages�good or bad? | |
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| Further reading, review questions, etc. | |
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| Recent past, present, future | |
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| The heyday of English | |
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| The new internationalism | |
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| French, German, Russian, English | |
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| The time of English | |
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| Images of English | |
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| Chinese and English in China | |
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| East and West | |
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| Baihua, Putonghua, and the simplified script | |
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| From antiquity to modern times in a hundred years | |
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| Language in school, language in life | |
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| English and China | |
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| Words, script, thought | |
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| The future | |
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| What next? | |
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| In two hundred years | |
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| In two thousand years | |
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| In two million years | |
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| Further reading, review questions, etc | |
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| Chronology | |
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| References | |
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| Guidelines for answers to review questions | |
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| Index | |