Research Guides: LING 297: Introduction to Bilingualism (Pérez Báez): Background Information

Background Information

As you start your research, it can be useful to look at sources like encyclopedias, handbooks, and dictionaries. These are also known as reference sources. They can help you identify or refine a topic for your research, find useful definitions, basic information, or overviews of a specific subject or issue, identify key concepts and researchers in the field, and find other materials which might be useful for your research.

UO Libraries has sources like these both online and in print form. Print books are located in Knight Library and are organized by call number. To find the exact location of print books in Knight Library, click on the link to be taken to the catalog record and click "Locate." This will tell you which floor of the library and which shelf number the book is located on.

Reference Materials for Linguistics

Linguistics Reference Sources

Linguistics - Oxford bibliographies This link opens in a new window
Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics is a bibliography and reference tool that provides expert commentary to help students and scholars find, negotiate, and assess the large amount of information readily available to them in the field of Linguistics.

Annual Review of Linguistics
Literature reviews can also provide a useful overview of the research on a topic. While you can find literature reviews published in peer-reviewed journals, Annual Review of Linguistics focuses entirely on literature reviews in the field of Linguistics.

Language Reference Sources

Ethnologue: languages of the world This link opens in a new window
Reference database profiling all of the world’s known living languages.

Glottolog (Comprehensive reference information for the world's languages, especially the lesser known languages)
Glottolog aims to provide complete references on the world's languages (apart from national languages and a few dozen other major languages for which thousands of studies exist). At the moment, it contains 408600 references on 26285 varieties and families. (as of 10/12/2022)

Cultural Information Sources

Anthropology online This link opens in a new window Anthropology Online brings together a wide range of written ethnographies, field notes, seminal texts, memoirs, and contemporary studies, covering human behavior the world over. Essential for study in the areas of politics, economics, history, psychology, environmental studies, religion, area studies, linguistics, and geography, the database will contain more than over 100,000 pages of full-text material at completion, including tens of thousands of pages of previously unpublished material from major archives.
eHRAF World Cultures This link opens in a new window eHRAF World Cultures contains ethnographic collections covering all aspects of cultural and social life. eHRAF is unique in having subject indexing at the paragraph level. This allows detailed and precise searching for concepts not easily found with keywords.

Selected Handbooks & Encyclopedias

This is a selection of some of the encyclopedias and handbooks the UO Libraries has related to bilingualism and Linguistics. We also have access to many others, both online and in print. Try searching LibrarySearch for additional resources by typing (handbook OR encyclopedia) and the broad topic of your interest.