The present work is divided into two parts. Part I provides a general orientation to the material for both linguists and non-linguists. Part II contains information about 700 of the world's languages. Chapter 1 presents a few of the essentials about language and languages for non-linguists. Chapter 2 provides a brief explanation of how the data are arranged and what they represent. Chapter 3 contains a detailed description of how speech sounds are produced, and Chapter 4 summarizes the symbols used to represent these sounds. Chapter 5 outlines the genetic classification of the world's languages, and gives a thumbnail sketch of each language family. The bulk of Part II consists of information on 700 languages, arranged alphabetically by language name. Part II concludes with: (1) a summary of the genetic classification of all the languages included in Part II, (2) maps showing the location of language families and (selected) languages, (3) tables summarizing the linguistic data, and (4) a bibliography. (Author/CFM)