The great diversity of ethnicities and languages in Africa encourages a vision of Africa as a fragmented continent, with language maps only perpetuating this vision by drawing discrete language groups. In reality, however, most people can communicate with most others within and across linguistic boundaries, even if not in languages taught or learned in schools. Many disciplines have looked carefully at language movement and change on the continent, but their lack of interaction has prevented the emergence of a cohesive picture of African languages. Tracing Language Movement in Africa gathers eighteen scholars together to offer a truly multidisciplinary representation of language in Africa, combining insights from history, archaeology, religion, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. The resulting volume illuminates commonalities and distinctions in these disciplines' understanding of language change and movement in Africa. The volume is empirical -- aiming to represent language more accurately on the continent -- as well as theoretical. It identifies the theories that each discipline uses to make sense of language movement in Africa in plain terms and highlights the themes that cut across all disciplines: how scholars use data, understand boundaries, represent change, and conceptualize power. The volume is organized to reflect differing conceptions of language that arise from its discipline-specific contributions: that is, tendencies to study changes that consolidate language or those that splinter it, viewing languages as whole or in part. Each contribution includes a short explanation of a discipline's theoretical and methodological approaches to language movement and change to ensure that the chapters are accessible to non-specialists, followed by an illustrative empirical case study. This volume will inspire multidisciplinary conversations around the study of language change in Africa, opening new interdisciplinary dialogue and spurring scholars to adapt the questions, data, and method of other disciplines to the problems that animate their own fields.

Since the launch of the Human Genome project in 1990, understanding molecular and clinical genetics has become an essential aspect of modern medical education. Solid knowledge of genetics is now crucial to a host of healthcare professionals, including primary care physicians, nurses and physician assistants. This third edition takes this information and incorporates it into a student-friendly format that focuses on the core concept of human genetics. Each chapter uses the same problem-based approach as the previous editions, and addresses the important role of genetics and disease by integrating molecular and clinical genetics.

Covering the political, social and historical background of each language, Dictionary of Languages offers a unique insight into human culture and communication. Every language with official status is included, as well as all those that have a written literature and 175 'minor' languages with special historical or anthropological interest. We see how, with the rapidly increasing uniformity of our culture as media's influence spreads, more languages have become extinct or are under threat of extinction. The text is highlighted by maps and charts of scripts, while proverbs, anecdotes and quotations reveal the features that make a language unique.