This volume provides descriptions and interpretations of social and cognitive phenomena as well as processes that emerge at the interface of languages and cultures in the context of contrastive and contact linguistics and media discourse. Different contexts are explored with rich empirical findings and authentic exemplifying materials. The book includes fifteen papers, divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses conceptual reflection on languages and cultures in contact and contrast, while Part 2 focuses on contact linguistics and borrowing. Part 3 discusses cultural and linguistic aspects of media discourses.

The book presents a new theory of the relationship between language and culture in a transnational and global perspective. The fundamental view is that languages spread across cultures, and cultures spread across languages, or in other words, that linguistic and cultural practices flow through social networks in the world along partially different paths and across national structures and communities.

This volume seeks to answers such questions as: how is conscious experience translated into discourse? How are foregrounding and backgrounding accomplished? What is the function of features like lexical choice and referential choice? And many more.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview, as well as breaking new ground, in a versatile and fast growing field. It contains four sections: Contrastive, Cross-cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics, Teaching and Testing of Second/Foreign Language Pragmatics, and Pragmatics in Corporate Culture Communication, covering a wide range of topics, from speech acts and politeness issues to Lingua Franca and Corporate Crises Communication. The approach is theoretical, methodological as well as applied, with a focus on authentic, interactional data. All articles are written by renowned leading specialists, who provide in-depth, up-to-date overviews, and view new directions and visions for future research.

In this interdisciplinary book, Juliane House breaks new ground by situating translation within Applied Linguistics. In thirteen chapters, she examines translation as a means of communication across different languages and cultures, provides a critical overview of different approaches to translation, of the link between culture and translation, and between views of context and text in translation. Featuring an account of translation from a linguistic-cognitive perspective, House covers problematic issues such as the existence of universals of translation, cases of untranslatability and ways and means of assessing the quality of a translation. Recent methodological and research avenues such as the role of corpora in translation and the effects of globalization processes on translation are presented in a neutral, non-biased manner. The book concludes with a thorough, historical account of the role of translation in foreign language learning and teaching and a discussion of new challenges and problems of the professional practice of translation in our world today. Written by a highly experienced teacher and researcher in the field, Translation as Communication across Languages and Cultures is an essential resource for students and researchers of Translation Studies, Applied Linguistics and Communication Studies.

This book examines the linkage between literacy and linguistic diversity, embedding them in their social and cultural contexts. It illustrates that a more complete understanding of literacy among diverse populations and in multicultural societies requires attention to issues of literacy per se as well as to improving an educational process that has relevance beyond members of majority cultures and linguistic groups. The focus of the book is on the social and cultural contexts in which literacy develops and is enacted, with an emphasis on the North American situation. Educators and researchers are discovering that cognitive approaches, while very valuable, are insufficient by themselves to answer important questions about literacy in heterogeneous societies. By considering the implications of family, school, culture, society, and nation for literary processes, the book answers the following questions. In a multi-ethnic context, what does it mean to be literate? What are the processes involved in becoming and being literate in a second language? In what ways is literacy in a second language similar and in what ways is it different from mother-tongue literacy? What factors must be understood to better describe and facilitate literacy acquisition among members of ethnic and linguistic minorities? What are some current approaches that are being used to accomplish this? These are vital questions for researchers and educators in a world that has a large number of immigrants, a variety of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual societies, and an increasing degree of multinational activity. Beyond addressing applied concerns, attending to these questions can provide new insights into basic aspects of literacy.

A landmark work on human migration around the globe, Cultures in Contact provides a history of the world told through the movements of its people. It is a broad, pioneering interpretation of the scope, patterns, and consequences of human migrations over the past ten centuries. In this magnum opus thirty years in the making, Dirk Hoerder reconceptualizes the history of migration and immigration, establishing that societal transformation cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of migrations and, indeed, that mobility is more characteristic of human behavior than is stasis. Signaling a major paradigm shift, Cultures in Contact creates an English-language map of human movement that is not Atlantic Ocean-based. Hoerder describes the origins, causes, and extent of migrations around the globe and analyzes the cultural interactions they have triggered. He pays particular attention to the consequences of immigration within the receiving countries. His work sweeps from the eleventh century forward through the end of the twentieth, when migration patterns shifted to include transpacific migration, return migrations from former colonies, refugee migrations, and distinct regional labor migrations in the developing world. Hoerder demonstrates that as we enter the third millennium, regional and intercontinental migration patterns no longer resemble those of previous centuries. They have been transformed by new communications systems and other forces of globalization and transnationalism.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture presents the first comprehensive survey of research on the relationship between language and culture. It provides readers with a clear and accessible introduction to both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies of language and culture, and addresses key issues of language and culturally based linguistic research from a variety of perspectives and theoretical frameworks. This Handbook features thirty-three newly commissioned chapters which cover key areas such as cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, cognitive anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and sociolinguistics offer insights into the historical development, contemporary theory, research, and practice of each topic, and explore the potential future directions of the field show readers how language and culture research can be of practical benefit to applied areas of research and practice, such as intercultural communication and second language teaching and learning. Written by a group of prominent scholars from around the globe, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture provides a vital resource for scholars and students working in this area.

This book provides an overview of approaches to language and culture, and it outlines the broad interdisciplinary field of anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It identifies current and future directions of research, including language socialization, language reclamation, speech styles and genres, language ideology, verbal taboo, social indexicality, emotion, time, and many more. Furthermore, it offers areal perspectives on the study of language in cultural contexts (namely Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Europe), and it lays the foundation for future developments within the field. In this way, the book bridges the disciplines of cultural anthropology and linguistics and paves the way for the new book series Anthropological Linguistics.

Based on the commonly held assumption that we now live in a world that is ‘on the move’, with growing opportunities for both real and virtual travel and the blurring of boundaries between previously defined places, societies and cultures, the theme of this book is firmly grounded in the interdisciplinary field of ‘Mobilities’. ‘Mobilities’ deals with the movement of people, objects, capital, information, ideas and cultures on varying scales, and across a variety of borders, from the local to the national to the global. It includes all forms of travel from forced migration for economic or political reasons, to leisure travel and tourism, to virtual travel via the myriad of electronic channels now available to much of the world’s population. Underpinning the choice of theme is a desire to consider the important role of languages and intercultural communication in travel and border crossings; an area which has tended to remain in the background of Mobilities research. The chapters included in this volume represent unique interdisciplinary understandings of the dual concepts of mobile language and border crossings, from crossings in ‘virtual life’ and ‘real life’, to crossings in literature and translation, and finally to crossings in the ‘semioscape’ of tourist guides and tourism signs. This book was originally published as a special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication.