The second edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language incorporates extensive new research in areas such as speech synthesis and recognition, acoustics, machine translation, natural language processing, endangered languages, language teaching and World English. In addition there is new and revised material on the number of speakers of languages, revised geopolitical data, new language distribution maps and a new table of world languages. The book has been redesigned to suit the needs of present-day readers and is printed in full colour for the first time.