After decades of being overlooked, corpus evidence is becoming an important component of the teaching and learning of languages. Above all, the profession needs guidance in the practicalities of using corpora, interpreting the results and applying them to the problems and opportunities of the classroom. This book is intensely practical, written mainly by a new generation of language teachers who are acknowledged experts in central aspects of the discipline.

The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America.

'Dialect and Dichotomy' outlines the history of dialect writing in English and its influence on linguistic variation. It also surveys American dialect writing and its relationship to literary, linguistic, political, and cultural trends, with emphasis on African American voices in literature. Furthermore, this book introduces and critiques canonical works in literary dialect analysis and covers recent, innovative applications of linguistic analysis of literature.

This step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora discusses the role that corpus linguistics plays in linguistic theory. It demonstrates that corpora have proven to be very useful resources for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of English should be based on real rather than contrived data. The author shows how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus and how to annotate and conduct a linguistic analysis once the corpus has been created.

This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also considers parellel developments among Europe's Neanderthals and the contrasting outcomes for the two species.