The World's Major Languages features over 50 of the world's languages and language families. This revised edition includes updated bibliographies for each chapter and up-to-date census figures. The featured languages have been chosen based on the number of speakers, their role as official languages and their cultural and historical importance. Each language is looked at in depth, and the chapters provide information on both grammatical features and on salient features of the language's history and cultural role. The World's Major Languages is an accessible and essential reference work for linguists.

This book provides a social interpretation of written South African translation history from the seventeenth century to the present, considering how trends involving various languages have reflected ideologies and unequal power relations and focusing attention on translation's often hidden social operation. Translation is investigated in relation to colonial mercantilism, scientific knowledge of extraction, Christian missionary conversion, Islamic education, various nationalisms, apartheid oppression and the anti-apartheid struggle, neoliberalism, exclusion and post-apartheid social transformation by employing Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory. This book will be an essential resource for scholars, graduate students, and general readers who are interested in or work on the history and practice of translation and its cultural agents in the South African context.

This book provides an overview of second language (L2) motivation research in a specific European context: Hungary, which has proved to offer an important laboratory for such research, as a number of major political changes over the past 30 years have created a changing background for L2 learning in an increasingly globalized world. The book provides an overview of theoretical research on L2 motivation, together with detailed information on large-scale L2 motivation studies in Hungary. Further, it presents a meta-analysis of the most important investigations, and qualitative data on teachers' views regarding success in L2 learning. In turn, the interdisciplinary nature of L2 motivation is taken into account and relevant antecedent constructs to L2 motivation are investigated. Lastly, the book outlines possible future directions for L2 motivation research.

This edited book brings together case studies from different contexts which all explore how a rapidly evolving digital landscape is impacting translation and intercultural communication. The chapters examine different facets of digitization, including how professional translators leverage digital tools and why, the types of digital data Translation Studies scholars can now observe, and how the Digital Humanities are impacting how we teach and theorize translation in an era of automation and artificial intelligence. The volume gives voice to research from across the professional and academic spectrum, with representation from Hong Kong, Canada, France, Algeria, South Korea, Japan, Brazil and the UK. This book will be of interest to professionals and academics working in the field of translation, as well as digital humanities and communications scholars.

This book investigates community interpreting services as a market offering that satisfies the needs of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) members of the Australian community, with an additional chapter on the Turkish context. Bringing together the disciplines of interpreting studies and management, the author analyses a variety of challenges which still arise in various fields of interpreting and suggest possible solutions, as well as future directions for other global contexts where changing demographics mean that community-based interpreting is increasingly relevant. Based on interviews with various stakeholders including directors, interpreters, and trainers in the private sector or state-run institutions, the book's main focus is the real experiences of people working on the ground in community interpreting. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, interpreting and migration studies, as well as interpreters and their trainers, and government policy-makers.

This book presents a corpus-based study of spoken learner language produced by university-level ESL students in the classroom. Using contemporary theories as a guide and employing cutting-edge corpus analysis tools and methods, the authors analyse a variety of learner speech to offer many new insights into the nature and characteristics of the spoken language of college ESL learners. Focusing on types of speech that are rarely examined, this original work makes a significant contribution to the study and understanding of ESL spoken language at university level. It will appeal to students and scholars of applied linguistics, corpus linguistics, second language acquisition and discourse analysis.

The volume contains most updated theoretical and empirical research on foreign or second language processes analyzed from the perspective of cognition and affect. It consists of articles devoted to various issued related to such broad topics as gender, literacy, translation or culture, to mention a few. The collection of papers offers a constructive and inspiring insight into a fuller understanding of the interconnection of the language-cognition-affect trichotomy.

This handbook provides a comprehensive account of current research on the finite-state morphology of Georgian and enables the reader to enter quickly into Georgian morphosyntax and its computational processing. It combines linguistic analysis with application of finite-state technology to processing of the language. The book opens with the author's synoptic overview of the main lines of research, covers the properties of the word and its components, then moves up to the description of Georgian morphosyntax and the morphological analyzer and generator of Georgian.The book comprises three chapters and accompanying appendices. The aim of the first chapter is to describe the morphosyntactic structure of Georgian, focusing on differences between Old and Modern Georgian. The second chapter focuses on the application of finite-state technology to the processing of Georgian and on the compilation of a tokenizer, a morphological analyzer and a generator for Georgian. The third chapter discusses the testing and evaluation of the analyzer's output and the compilation of the Georgian Language Corpus (GLC), which is now accessible online and freely available to the research community.Since the development of the analyzer, the field of computational linguistics has advanced in several ways, but the majority of new approaches to language processing has not been tested on Georgian. So, the organization of the book makes it easier to handle new developments from both a theoretical and practical viewpoint.The book includes a detailed index and references as well as the full list of morphosyntactic tags. It will be of interest and practical use to a wide range of linguists and advanced students interested in Georgian morphosyntax generally as well as to researchers working in the field of computational linguistics and focusing on how languages with complicated morphosyntax can be handled through finite-state approaches.

This edited book engages with the richly interdisciplinary field of business and professional communication, aiming to reconcile the prescriptive ambitions of the US-centred business communication tradition with the more descriptive approach favoured in discourse studies and applied linguistics. A follow-up to the award-winning book The Ins and Outs of Business and Professional Discourse Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), this volume brings together scholars and their recent work from wide-ranging business and professional settings to engage with the question of what counts as good data. The authors focus on four key themes - authenticity, triangulation, background and relevance - to shine a light on business and professional discourse as essential contextual and intertextual. This book will be of interest to scholars working in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and business communication, but also other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in workplace settings.

Written by leading experts in the field of TESOL, this book explores the literature on various topic areas and demonstrates how teachers can increase their levels of professionalism by acquiring some general and field-specific strategies. Being a teaching professional is not simply about having the right teaching qualifications and good academic standing, it involves a commitment to being innovative and transformative in the classroom and helping both students and colleagues achieve their goals. A dictionary definition of professionalism reads as follows: professionalism is the conduct, aims, or qualities that characterize or mark a profession or a professional person; and it defines a profession as a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation (Merriam-Webster, 2013). However, according to Bowman (2013), professionalism is less a matter of what professionals actually do and more a matter of who they are as human beings. Both of these views imply that professionalism encompasses a number of different attributes, and, together, these attributes identify and define a professional. The book is primarily intended for teachers at all levels and in all contexts who are interested in improving their professionalism and developing strategies that can take them to higher levels in the field of TESOL/ELT.

This book is the first to offer an interdisciplinary and comprehensive reference work on the often-marginalised languages of southern Africa. The authors analyse a range of different concepts and questions, including language and sociality, social and political history, multilingual government, and educational policies. In doing so, they present significant original research, ensuring that the work will remain a key reference point for the subject. This ambitious and wide-ranging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of southern African languages, sociolinguistics, history and politics.

This edited book examines English-Medium Instruction (EMI) language policy and practice in higher education around the world, highlighting how English language usage affects the internationalization of universities, the way that disciplines are taught and learned, and questioning whether internationalization through EMI achieves the values of global citizenship and inclusivity/diversity to which it aspires. Written by experts in the field, the book includes data-based research from universities around the globe, with three chapters on Asia and the Far East (Malaysia, Japan and China), four on Europe (Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy) and one each on Africa (Ethiopia) and Central America (Mexico). Sources include policy documents, questionnaire surveys, focus groups and semi-structured interviews involving university policymakers, lecturers, students, and administrative staff. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of language and education policy, internationalization and applied linguistics, particularly English-Medium Instruction (EMI), academic English and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).

This edited collection explores how science can be taught to English language learners (ELLs) in 21st century classrooms. The authors focus on the ways in which pre-service and in-service science teachers have developed-or may develop-instructional effectiveness for working with ELLs in the secondary classroom. Chapter topics are grounded in both research and practice, addressing a range of timely topics including the current state of ELL education in the secondary science classroom, approaches to leveraging the talents and strengths of bilingual students in heterogeneous classrooms, best practices in teaching science to multilingual students, and ways to infuse the secondary science teacher preparation curriculum with ELL pedagogy. This book will appeal to an audience beyond secondary content area teachers and teacher educators to all teachers of ELLs, teacher educators and researchers of language acquisition more broadly.

He's as mad as a hatter!

Whether it's like a bump on a log or a bat out of hell, these expressions have been around forever, but we've never really known why ... until now! Finally Dr. Funk explains more than 400 droll, colorful, and sometimes pungent expressions of everyday speech. Derived from classical sources, historic events, famous literature, frontier humor, and the frailties of humankind, each of these sayings has an interesting story behind its origin.

If you've ever wondered why when you're in a hurry you are told to hold your horses, wonder no more!

This book explores the concept of complementation in the adjectival domain of English grammar. Alternation between non-finite complements, especially to infinitives and gerundial complements, has been investigated intensively on the basis of large corpora in the last few years. With very few exceptions, however, such work has hitherto been based on univariate analysis methods. Using multivariate analysis, the authors present methodologically innovative case studies examining a large array of explanatory factors potentially impacting complement choice in cases of alternation. This approach yields more precise information on the impact of each factor on complement choice as well as on interactions between different explanatory factors. The book thus presents a methodologically new perspective on the study of the system of non-finite complementation in recent English and variation within that system, and will be relevant to academics and students with an interest in English grammar, predicate complementation, and statistical approaches to language.

Although new technologies are embedded in students' lives today, there is often an assumption that their use is transparent, inconsequential, or a distraction. This book combines complex systems theory with sociocultural theory and the multimodal theory of communication, providing an innovative theoretical framework to examine how communication and meaning-making in the language classroom have developed over time, how technology impacts on meaning-making, and what the implications are for learners, teachers, institutions and policy makers. Recent studies provide evidence for the disruptive effect of technology which has resulted in a phase shift that is reshaping language education by creating new interaction patterns, allowing for multimodal communication, and introducing real-world communication into the classroom. The book proposes ways of responding to this shift before concluding that the new technologies are radically transforming the way we learn. It is likely to appeal to a range of readers, including students, academics, teachers and policy-makers.

This book presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in England. Showcasing developments in sociolinguistic theory, method and application, the chapters examine sociolinguistic topics on different linguistic levels and in different geographical areas across the country. Allowing the reader to engage with contemporary research in the field, each chapter is unique in the topic or geographical area explored. Topics include historical sociolinguistics, British Sign Language, lexical variation, life-span change, and variation and innovation in urban and peripheral areas; while the regions covered range from Cornwall to West Cumbria. Edited and authored by a range of international scholars, this is sure to be a key research resource for students and scholars interested in language use in England.

This edited book brings together contributions from different educational contexts across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in order to explore how L2 English writing is assessed. Across seven MENA countries, the book covers aspects of practice including: task design and curriculum alignment, test (re)development, rubric design, the subjective decision making that underpins assessing students' writing and feedback provision, learner performance and how research methods help shed light on initiatives to improve student writing. In such coverage, chapter authors provide concrete evidence of how assessment practice is governed by their unique context, yet also influenced by international standards, trends and resources. This book will be of interest to second language teachers, assessors and programme developers as well as test designers and evaluators.

This book tackles the interface between translation and pragmatics. It comprises case studies in English, Greek, Russian and Chinese translation practice, which highlight the potential of translation to interact with pragmatics and reshape meaning making in a target language in various pragmatically relevant ways. Fiction and non-fiction genres merge to suggest a rich inventory of interlingual transfer instances which can broaden our perception of what may be shifting in translation transfer. Authors use an emic approach (in addition to an etic one) to confirm results which they often present graphically. The book has a didactic perspective in that it shows how pragmatic awareness can regulate translator behaviour and is also useful in foreign language teaching, because it shows how important implicit knowledge can be, in shaping the message in a foreign language.

This edited book focuses on speech etiquette, examining the rules that govern communication in various online communities: professional, female, and ethnospecific. The contributors analyze online communication in the Slavic languages Russian, Slovak, Polish, and Belarusian, showing how the concept of speech etiquette differs from the concept of politeness, although both reflect the relationship between people in interaction. Online communities are united on the basis of common informative or phatic illocutions among their participants, and their speech etiquette is manifested in stable forms of conducting discussions - stimulating and responding. Each group has its own ideas of unacceptable speech behavior and approaches to sanitation, and the rules of speech etiquette in each group determine the degree of rapport and distancing between the participants in discourse. The chapters in this book explore how rapport and distance are established through acts such as showing attention to the addressee and increasing his or her communicative status; reducing or increasing the illocutionary power of evaluations and motivations; and evaluating one's own or someone else's speech. The volume will be of interest to researchers studying online communication in such diverse fields as linguistics, sociology, anthropology, programming, and media studies.

'As entertaining as it is engrossing' John Banville 'Enlightening, delightful' Arthur der Weduwen, author of The Library Why don't eleven and twelve end in -teen? The rest of our counting system sits in neatly arithmetical sets of ten, so why do these two rulebreakers seem so at odds with the numbers that follow them? Admittedly, that's probably a question that might never have occurred to you. But if you're even remotely interested in the origins and oddities of language, it's likely also a question you're now intrigued to know the answer to. Nor is it the only question: take a moment to think about how our language operates and even more spring mind. Why do these letters look the way they do? Why are some uppercase and others lowercase? Why are these words in this order? How are you understanding what these seemingly arbitrary shapes and symbols mean, while doubtless hearing them read to you in a voice inside your head? And what is this question mark really doing at this end of this sentence? Books explaining the origins of our most intriguing words and phrases have long proved popular, but they often overlook the true nuts and bolts of language: the origins of our alphabet and writing system; grammatical rules and conventions; the sound structure of language; and even how our brains and bodies interpret and communicate language itself. Why Is This a Question? is a fascinating and enlightening exploration of linguistic questions you've likely never thought to ask. 'Every page will make you stop, think and wonder.' James Hawes, author of The Shortest History of England 'Enthralling, with a riveting "who knew?" moment on nearly every page.' Caroline Taggart, author of Humble Pie and Cold Turkey