Keith Allan is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Monash University and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland.

1. What is linguistics? 2. Evolutionary linguistics: how Language and languages got to be the way they are 3. Gesture and sign: utterance uses of visible bodily action 4. Writing systems: methods for recording language 5. Phonetics: the sounds humans make when speaking 6. Phonology 7. Morphology: the structure of words 8. Syntax: putting words together 9. Syntax as the dynamics of language understanding 10. Semantics: the meaning of words and sentences 11. Lexical semantics today 12. Lexicography: the construction of dictionaries and thesauruses 13. Pragmatics: language use in context 14. The linguistics of politeness and social relations 15. Narrative and narrative structure 16. Anthropological linguistics and field linguistics 17. Sociolinguistics: language in social environments 18. Psycholinguistics: language and cognition 19. Neurolinguistics: mind, brain, and language 20. First language acquisition 21. Second language acquisition and applied linguistics 22. Historical linguistics and relationships among languages 23. Linguistic change in grammar 24. Language endangerment 25. Linguistic typology and language universals 26. Translating between languages 27. Structural linguistics 28. Biolinguistics 29. Cognitive linguistics 30. Functional linguistics 31. Computational linguistics 32. Corpus linguistics 33. Linguistics and philosophy 34. Linguistics and the law 35. Linguistics and politics 36. Linguistics and social media

The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics serves as an introduction and reference point to key areas in the field of linguistics. This handbook draws together a range of perspectives to provide a broad and comprehensive survey of the field. The 36 chapters, written by specialists from around the world, provide an overview of each topic, an introduction to current hypotheses and issues, and possible future trajectory, along with suggestions for further reading. The Routledge Handbook of Linguistics is essential reading for researchers, undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics and communication studies.