Whittemore Library: World Languages: Linguistics Focus

Welcome!

"The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind.”
― Arika Okrent

Selected Linguistics Books

Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics

A Credo Reference eBook

Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More than 400 Languages

P 371 .D35 1998 Ref

1st floor Quiet Study Room

A History of Language

A Credo Reference eBook

Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd edition

An eCampus Ontario eTextbook

Shades of Decolonial Voices in Linguistics

An Ebsco eBook

Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops: The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages

A JSTOR Open Access eBook

The Secrets of Words

A Libby/Overdrive eBook

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences

A Credo Reference eBook

What's Your Pronoun? Beyond He & She

P279 .B37 2020

Hate Speech: Linguistic Perspectives

An Ebsco eBook

Selected Databases with Linguistics Articles

Looking for linguistics literature in individual databases will depend on your focus: Neurolinguistics? Science databases. Teaching languages or Language acquisition? Education & Psychology databases. Language & culture? Sociological databases. Languages' literatures? Humanities databases. I think you get the idea.

To get started more quickly, enter your linguistics topic search words into our Ram Search Discovery Tool on the library main page - it will search ALL our databases (except streaming video collections) at one time.

Selected Linguistics Journals

Anthropological Linguistics
Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice
Journal of Linguistics
Journal of English Teaching and Applied Linguistics
Browse the DIretory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Linguistics Section
The DOAJ lists 943 indexed journals as being relevant to the topic of Linguistics.

Selected Online Linguistics Resources

Corpora
'Corpora' are searchable databases of language samples for linguistics research.
-- Linguistic Data Consortium - Over 600 corpora of text and spoken language.
-- English-Corpora.org - Previously known as the "BYU Corpora", these are some of the most well-known corpora of American and British English. Includes COCA, COHA and British National Corpus.
No-Cost Text Analysis & Visualization Tools
-- Google Books Ngram Viewer - When you enter phrases, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years. User Guide.
-- Voyant - A web-based text reading and analysis environment that enables users to read and explore a corpus of text using a multi-panel interface. Created for digital humanities students and scholars, the general public, and those new to digital humanities. Getting Started Guide
-- Textalyzer - Free Keyword Density Tool from a SEO optimization service.
-- Word and Phrase - Add content to a text box or use text from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and see medium and lower frequency word lists, their definitions/use based on COCA data, and compare phrases with similar ones found in the COCA, adding a thesaurus-like function.
-- EdWordle - Easy-to-use word cloud generator with customization options.
Conference Proceedings Repositories
A form of 'grey literature' (not published in a scholarly journal), current conference proceedings represent the most recent research findings in a field of study.
-- Cascadilla Proceedings Project - Proceedings from over a dozen conferences, available online.
-- Linguistic Society of America Proceedings - Proceedings of the LSA, LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts, and more.
-- UW Linguistics Conference Proceedings - Conference proceedings from UW Department of Linguistics affiliates.
General Linguistics Repositories
These will have a mixture of scholarly materials (published in scholarly journals) and 'grey literature' (scholarly, but not actually published in a journal).
-- ACL Anthology
-- LingBuzz
-- CogPrints
-- Semantics Archive
-- Rutgers Optimality Archive (ROA)
NOTE: Many of these types of repositories will include 'preprints'. Preprint = The article version just before it was peer-reviewed / published. Why might you want to look at one of these when peer-reviewed is considered better? You can at least get an idea of what they did, especially if you're just looking around for ideas and inspiration. (Just don't try to pass it off as the reviewed, published version).
YouTube Videos & Channels
Sure, they have ads, but shorter videos about linguistics offer an nice alternative for absorbing all those linguistics concepts.
-- NativLang - "This is where I share animated stories as I learn from & about people living on a planet full of languages and cultures."
-- Otherwords - "Sociolinguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky fınds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted."
-- Simon Roper - "I make videos mainly about topics in linguistics, but occasionally about anthropology in general."

Don't Forget!

The FSU Center for Digital Humanities, located on the Whittemore Library's Upper Mezzanine, has software (and training and support for its use) that is helpful to those doing certain types of linguistics research.