Last revised: July 2008

Linguistics

Scope: This guide provides links to and information about major electronic and print resources for the study of linguistics. Email the subject area specialist at thackman@umd.edu or call 301-314-8521 for more information.

Finding Books in the UM Libraries

• UM Libraries Catalog: Use the Catalog to search for books, journal titles, government documents, nonprint media, and other materials owned by the UM Libraries. Check the box for "USMAI (All Campuses)" in order to search the entire UM System at once. For best results, use the Library of Congress Subject Headings (viewable within individual records or by using the "Subject Beginning with..." search) or consult a reference librarian. Some examples of subject headings in linguistics are:

  Language and Languages Anthropological Linguistics Comparative Linguistics Discourse Analysis Historical Linguistics Semantics Sociolinguistics

  Linguistics Applied Linguistics Computational Linguistics Grammar Psycholinguistics Semiotics Structural Linguistics

  The search box below will open the Catalog and launch your search in a new window.

  word/s anywhere title beginning with... title word/s author beginning with... author word/s subject beginning with... subject word/s call number

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Finding Books in Other Locations

If you cannot find what you're looking for in the UM Libraries Catalog, try searching these other library catalogs. Use the links or the Interlibrary Loan page to place ILL requests for items not owned by UM.

• World Cat: OCLC catalog of books, serial publications, media, visual materials, musical scores, and archival materials in libraries worldwide. Includes over 62 million records in more than 400 languages.
• Center for Research Libraries Catalog: CRL is a consortium of North American academic and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through Interlibrary Loan.

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Finding Periodical Articles

Use these resources to find journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, etc. related to your topic. Consult Research Port for the full list of available Linguistics subject databases.

Core Databases

• Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA): Indexes and summarizes journal articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, selected conference proceedings, and book reviews on linguistics and its subdisciplines. Covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Complete coverage is also given to various fields of linguistics including descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.
• Science Citation Index: A multidisciplinary index covering the journal literature of the sciences. It indexes more than 5,700 major journals across 164 scientific disciplines. Virtually the only index for finding what papers have cited other papers. Cited references can be traced forward in time.
• Social Sciences Citation Index: Indexes over 17,000 journals by subject keyword, author name, journal title & author affiliation. Search author abstracts when available. Provides cited reference searching.
• Digital Dissertations: The authoritative source for information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses. The database represents the work of authors from over 1,000 graduate schools and universities. Full text is available from 1997 to the present.

Supplemental Databases

• ERIC: Useful For: Topics related to education, applied linguistics, language teaching and learning, testing, evaluation, etc. Provides access to information from over 1000 education and education-related journals as well as a variety of non-journal materials, or ERIC documents. It also provides the full text of more than 2,200 ERIC Digests (short reports on topics of current interest in education.) For more education-related materials, see Education Research Complete.
• MLA International Bibliography: Useful For: Topics related to literature, stylistics, literary and rhetorical devices, discourse and text analysis, etc. Indexes journals, books, essay collections, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies published worldwide in the areas of literary criticism, language, linguistics, rhetoric, and folklore of all countries.
• Philosopher's Index: Useful For: Topics related to semantics, philosophy of language. Philosopher's Index is a current and comprehensive bibliographic database covering scholarly research in all major fields of philosophy. Features author-written abstracts covering scholarly research published in journals and books, including contributions to anthologies and book reviews. Covers material published since 1940. For more material on the philosophy of language, try the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• PsycINFO: Useful For: Topics related to psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics. PsycINFO is the most comprehensive index in psychology and related fields, with more than 1.7 million citations and abstracts of journal articles, book chapters and books, technical reports, and dissertations. Its holdings include material from 1,700 periodicals in over 30 languages. For other materials related to cognitive linguistics and neurosciences, see CSA Neuroscience Abstracts or MIT's electronic text collection, CogNet.
• SocIndex: Useful For: Topics related to sociolinguistics. The index features more than 1,300,000 records with subject headings from a sociology-specific thesaurus. Also contains abstracts for more than 620 "core" coverage journals dating back to 1895, in addition to information for 1,890 "priority" and "selective coverage" journals. Extensive indexing for books, monographs, conference papers, and other sources is included. See also JSTOR Sociology.

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Reference Sources

The following resources may be excellent starting points for your research. They include not only authoritative information but also bibliographies that will lead you to other sources.

Bibliographies

• Bibliographie Linguistischer Literatur = Bibliography of Linguistic Literature. Frankfurt am Main, V. Klostermann, 1978- .
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P3 .B51
  NOTE: In German, 1978-Present. In German and English, 1998-Present.


• Linguistic Bibliography. Permanent International Committee of Linguists. Utrecht [Netherlands]: Spectrum, 1948-2001.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Periodical Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: Z7001 .P4
  NOTE: Volumes for 1993-2001 are available online via Linguistic Bibliography Online. See General Internet Resources, below, for more information.

Biographical Sources

• Lexicon Grammaticorum: Who's Who in the History of World Linguistics. Ed. Harro Stammerjohann, Sylvain Auroux, et al. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1996.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P83 .L49 1996
  


• Sebeok, Thomas Albert. Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746-1963. 2 vol. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1966.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P83.S4
  

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Dictionaries and Encyclopedias--General

• Crystal, David. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference CALL NUMBER: P29 .C65 2008
  


• Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Eds. Ruth Wodak and David Corson. 10 vol. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2008.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P40.8 .E53 2008
  


• The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed. Ed. Keith Brown, et al. 14 vols. Boston: Elsevier, 2006.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P29 .E48 2006
  


• Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Ed. Philipp Strazny. 2 vol. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P29 .E483 2005
  TABLE OF CONTENTS: http:://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0418/2004014173.html


• International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Ed. William J. Frawley. 4 vol. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P29 .I58 2003
  NOTE: 1992 edition located in McKeldin Stacks P29 .I58 1992


• Malmkjaer, Kirsten, ed. The Linguistics Encyclopedia. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P29.L52 2002
  

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Dictionaries and Encyclopedias--Specialized

• Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories. Ed. Keith Brown and Jim Miller. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1999.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P240.5 .C66 1999
  


• Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. Ed. Jacob L. Mey. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1998.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P99.4.P72 C62 1998
  


• Davies, Alan. A Glossary of Applied Linguistics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P129 .D368 2005
  


• Encyclopedia of Semiotics. Ed. Paul Bouissac. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P99 .E64 1998
  


• Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics: A Handbook for Language Teaching. Ed. Keith Johnson and Helen Johnson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P129 .E53 1998
  


• Trask, R.L. A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. London: Routledge, 1993.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P152 .T7 1993
  


• Trask, R. L. The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P143 .T727 2000
  


• Trask, R. L. A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. London: Routledge, 1996.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P216 .T73 1996
  


• Venev, Yvan Dimitrov. Elsevier's Dictionary of Mathematical and Computational Linguistics in Three Languages, English, French, and Russian. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P138 .V46 1990
  

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Guides and Handbooks

• The Blackwell Companion to Syntax. Ed. Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk. 5 vols. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P291 .B53 2006
  


• DeMiller, Anna L. Linguistics: A Guide to the Reference Literature. 2nd ed. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 2000.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P121.D42 2000
  


• Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Ed. Eli Hinkel. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P118.2 .H359 2005
  TABLE OF CONTENTS: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip052/2004023636.html

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Other Reference Sources

• The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World. Ed. Bernard Comrie, Stephen Matthews, and Maria Polinsky. Rev. ed. New York: Checkmark Books/Facts On File, 2003.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P107.A87 2003
  


• Atlas of the World's Languages. Ed. Christopher Moseley and R.E. Asher. London: Routledge, 2007.
  LOCATION: Government Documents Atlas
  CALL NUMBER: G1046.E3 A8 2007
  


• Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing. Ed. Stephen A. Wurm. Paris: UNESCO Publishing/Pacific Linguistics, 1996.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P40.5.L33 A841 1996
  


• Languages of the World (National Virtual Translation Center, http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/)
  "The main purpose of this website is to provide information about the language families of the world and their most important and populous members, including their history, status, their linguistic characteristics, and their writing in as simple and concise a way as possible." Includes brief, informative entries on numerous languages and language families, as well as an interactive language map.


• Parker, Philip M. Linguistic Cultures of the World: A Statistical Reference. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997.
  LOCATION: McKeldin Library Reference Stacks
  CALL NUMBER: P35 .P29 1997
  

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Internet Resources

The following web resources may help you connect with useful information on your topic. Be sure to evaluate the authority and reliability of all information found on the Internet. See Evaluating Web Sites or the Checklist for Evaluating Web Sites if you need help.

General Internet Resources

• Linguistic Bibliography Online (http://www.blonline.nl)
  "The Linguistic Bibliography Online provides bibliographical references to scholarly publications in linguistics. It covers all branches of linguistics, both theoretical and descriptive, from all geographical areas. The emphasis is on non-Indo-European languages and lesser known Indo-European languages, including endangered and extinct languages. As regards the place of publication, the focus is particularly on hard-to access linguistic works published outside Western Europe and North-America. This is guaranteed by the collaboration of some forty contributing specialists from all over the world. The database contains all entries of the printed volumes of the Linguistic Bibliography for the years 1993-2003 and an increasing number of more recent references."
• Languages in Latin America (http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/languages/)
  Resources on languages spoken in Latin America, compiled by the Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC).
• The Linguist List (http://www.linguistlist.org/)
  "The world's largest online linguistic resource." The site includes over 2000 pages and runs a mailing list with over 22,000 subscribers worldwide. You can find resources by subject area or by material type, including academic papers, books, book reviews, conferences, dissertations, journals, web resources and much more.
• Google Directory for Linguistics
  (http://www.google.com/Top/Science/Social_Sciences/Linguistics/)
• Yahoo! Directory for Linguistics
  (http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Linguistics_and_Human_Languages/)

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Selected Professional Organizations

These organizations' websites may contain useful information or links to other resources. Some may contain pages that are only accessible to organization members.

• Linguistic Society of America (LSA) (http://www.lsadc.org/):
  Founded in 1924, LSA is the largest linguistic society in the world and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It is the only umbrella professional linguistics organization in the US, with over 5,000 individual and library members.
• American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) (http://www.aaal.org/):
  Founded in 1977, AAAL is a professional organization of scholars who are interested in and actively contribute to the multi-disciplinary field of applied linguistics.
• American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)
  (http://www.actfl.org/): ACTFL is the only national organization dedicated to the improvement and expansion of the teaching and learning of all languages at all levels of instruction throughout the U.S.
• American Dialect Society (http://www.americandialect.org/):
  Founded in 1889, the American Dialect Society is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it.
• American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) (http://www.asha.org/):
  ASHA is the professional, scientific, and credentialing association for more than 123,000 members and affiliates who are audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and speech, language, and hearing scientists.
• Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
  (http://www.aclweb.org/): The Association for Computational Linguistics is THE international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. The ACL journal, Computational Linguistics, continues to be the primary forum for research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
• Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) (http://www.cal.org/):
  CAL is a private, non-profit organization: a group of scholars and educators who use the findings of linguistics and related sciences in identifying and addressing language-related problems. CAL carries out a wide range of activities including research, teacher education, analysis and dissemination of information, design and development of instructional materials, technical assistance, conference planning, program evaluation, and policy analysis.
• International Phonetic Association (IPA) (http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipa.html):
  The IPA is the major as well as the oldest representative organisation for phoneticians. It was established in 1886 in Paris. The aim of the IPA is to promote the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science.
• Modern Language Association (MLA) (http://www.mla.org):
  Founded in 1883 by teachers and scholars, the Modern Language Association promotes the study and teaching of language and literature. Includes a Language Studies division, with subdivisions on Language and Society, Language Theory, Applied Linguistics and Language Change
• Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA)
  (http://www.ssila.org/): SSILA was founded in December 1981 as the international scholarly organization representing American Indian linguistics, and was incorporated in 1997. Membership in SSILA is open to all those who are interested in the scientific study of the languages of the native peoples of North, Central and South America.

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