This book presents an investigation of language contact, focusing on Northwestern China. It breaks down the barrier between human sciences and natural sciences in order to reconsider the diversity of languages on the basis of the latest research findings from genetics, linguistics, and other domains, offering valuable insights into when and how the divergence of languages and genes began and language and gene admixture and replacement occurred. The book focuses on language evolution between the border of Gansu and Qinghai Province in China, but the research doesn't neglect the area beyond China's northern borders. Manchu, a dying language belonging to the Tungusic group, is also studied to enhance our understanding of language replacement. This work is the result of a four-year collaboration between teams of geneticists and linguists in France and China.

Promoting cultural understanding in a globalized world, this text is a key tool for students interested in further developing their understanding of Chinese society and culture. Written by a team of experts in their fields, this book provides a survey of Chinese culture, delving deeper into areas such as Chinese philosophy, religion, politics and education. It offers the reader a wide range of essential facts to better understand contemporary China through its history and cultural background, touching on key areas such as the development of science and technology in China, as well as the country's economy and trade history, and is a key read for scholars and students in Chinese Culture, Sociology and Politics.

This book investigates the internationalization of Chinese culture in recent decades and the global dimensions of Chinese culture from comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. It covers a variety of topics concerning the contemporary significance of Chinese culture in its philosophical, literary and artistic manifestations, including literature, film, performing arts, creative media, linguistics, translations and philosophical ideas. The book explores the reception of Chinese culture in different geographic locations and how the global reception of Chinese culture contrasts with the local Chinese community. The chapters collectively cover gender studies and patriarchal domination in Chinese literature in comparison to the world literature, explorations on translation of Chinese culture in the West, Chinese studies as an academic discipline in the West, and Chinese and Hong Kong films and performances in the global context. The book is an excellent resource for both scholars and students interested in the development of Chinese culture on the global stage in the 21st Century.

This edited collection provides a state-of-the art overview of research on willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second and foreign language. In particular, it includes innovative studies seeking to demonstrate the ways in which WTC can be examined within the framework of complex dynamic systems, how the construct is related to self-assessment, reticence and extroversion, and what is signifies in the case of immigrants. Another group of papers is related to the role of technology in fostering WTC in different contexts. The volume also comprises papers that touch on methodological issues in the study of WTC such as experience case sampling, the network approach or the integration of the macro- and micro-perspective. The book will be of values to researchers interested in the study of WTC but will also provide inspiration for students, teachers and materials writers.

The Standard edition of his educational tool teaches Russian grammar.

This is a serious book examining the original sounds and meanings of languages right back to the Stone Age - up until now believed to be impossible. But it can also be seen as tracing the overwhelming sexual orientation of human thinking for the last six hundred thousand years or more - when we were only hominids, squatting round the camp fires at the mouths of our caves - to keep the sabre toothed tigers out. It was here that our original bare bottomed language committees first got to grips with meanings and their audible representation. The committees were convened as a result of the taming of fire, the high tech of the day. It was a cosy environment in a cold and hostile world, and the unaccustomed warmth led to an outburst of amorous inclinations, and the need to express them in words. Ka they thought echoic of the strike of flint on flint, and so striking, and so the tenderising of raw meat for which they had already been making "hand axes" for at least half a million years. It is from ka-ka for tenderising with a hand axe that our cooking comes! The flame did it for you. Flint knapping left a lot of "debetage" or waste flakes, whence ka-ka also came to mean waste - including today human waste. Metaphor led to odd bedfellows. All this evidence is decoded from an exhaustive forty year research into over a hundred languages, many of them dead ones, where like flies in amber our original Lithic (Stone Age) language roots are still embedded. There is nothing salacious in the tale. It simply tells it as it is and was, and it is not going to go away. This short version is abstracted from a major work of over 600 pages, and there is nothing in it which the ordinary man in the street (and his sister) can not easily follow. It ranks quite highly in the order of useless information, but it has its indirect usage. If you understand how all our languages have actually come about - the product of human whimsy - you will be that much less likely to believe some of the sillier alternative views put forward by ideologically inclined placemen. Lastly, how has Lithic Language been cracked? The answer lies in "semantic triangulation". Believe it or not, all our languages today (over 6000) bear traces of the original meanings given to the sounds as we first learned to articulate them, and it is possible to work backwards using the current meanings in numerous languages to home in on the original source meanings which are common to the current ones. Then we can see if they make sense as a first guess by our Stone Age (hominid) forebears of what they thought of as the "natural" meanings of the sounds. They didn't do thinking very much. That is how they all guessed the same, or nearly the same. So we are probably on the right track: language was all spun by human whimsy, (over a few hundred millennia), from only a baker's dozen original articulated sounds. The English language alone reached a million words last year.

This book describes the dubbing process of English-language animated films produced by US companies in the 21st century, exploring how linguistic variation and multilingualism are used to create characters and identities and examining how Italian dubbing professionals deal with this linguistic characterisation. The analysis carried out relies on a diverse range of research tools: text analysis, corpus study and personal communications with dubbing practitioners. The book describes the dubbing workflow and dubbing strategies in Italy and seeks to identify recurrent patterns and therefore norms, as well as stereotypes or creativity in the way multilingualism and linguistic variation are tackled. It will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, linguistic variation, film and media.

If we can agree that creativity is the highest activity of the human mind, then Bingo You have hit the jackpot. You have just walked into a powerhouse of fully illustrated, well written, creative prompts. They are accessible, entertaining, teeming with energy and as the art work on the cover indicates, original. Spend a few minutes perusing The Review and you'll see how the author has captured the dynamics of the King's English in such a way as to separate it from other books in the field. You'll enjoy it.

Contemporary debates on immigration, multiculturalism, nationalism, and linguistic rights often find language policy scholars and political philosophers at odds. This book aims to assess the obstacles and build bridges between scholars of language policy and political theory with chapters by Stephen May, Ronald Schmidt, Jr., Daniel Weinstock, Thomas Ricento, Yael Peled and Peter Ives. Along with an introduction by the editors, the chapters map out the contours of the debates and potential contributions that political theory can make to language policy and vice-versa. The book offers an appraisal of current research, areas of contestation and a framework for future interdisciplinary inquiry on the complex interface between language, power and ethics. This collection will be useful for scholars from diverse disciplinary perspectives with interests in contemporary societal debates in which language plays an important-even central-role. Previously published in Language Policy, Volume 13, Issue 4, 2014

This book names and confounds the mono-mainstream assumption that invisibly frames much research, the ideologies that normalize monolingualism, monoculturalism, monoliteracy, mononationalism, and/or monomodal ways of knowing. In its place, the authors propose multi- and trans- lenses of these phenomena steeped in a raciolinguistic perspective on Bourdieu's reflexive sociology to move toward a more accurate, multidimensional view of racialized peoples' literacy and language practices. To achieve this, they first engage in a comprehensive review of literacies, languaging, and a critical sociocultural framework. Then, the distinct testimonios of four women underscore this framework in practice, followed by action steps for research, policy, and pedagogy. This book will be of particular interest to literacy and language education researchers.

Some years ago, the author of these columns was sitting in a Zen monastery in California, blissfully meditating, when someone slipped a folded note, underneath his cushion. The note had the word "Help," and no other information, except for an email address. When he wrote to the email address, to inquire as to what "Help," exactly, was needed, he received only the response, "Thank you." Two days later he received a second email advising him that someone of importance had greatly enjoyed reading these columns when they were originally published, and that they, a publishing house in New York, had funds specifically allocated for a guidebook on Costa Rica, and that these funds would be reassigned elsewhere, unless a Costa Rica guidebook could quickly be assembled, and would he be the one to do this. Not being one to pass up allocated funds, he assembled the columns and produced this book, which has turned out to be unquestionably the definite book on all things Costa Rican.

This book probes for a post-native-speakerist future. It explores the nature of (English and Japanese) native-speakerism in the Japanese context, and possible grounds on which language teachers could be employed if native-speakerism is rejected (i.e., what are the language teachers of the future expected to do, and be, in practice?). It reveals the problems presented by the native-speaker model in foreign language education by exploring individual teacher-researcher narratives related to workplace experience and language-based inclusion/exclusion, as well as Japanese native-speakerism in the teaching of Japanese as a foreign language. It then seeks solutions to the problems by examining the concept of post-native-speakerism in relation to multilingual perspectives and globalisation generally, with a specific focus on education.

In 1821, Sequoyah, a Cherokee metalworker and inventor, introduced a writing system that he had been developing for more than a decade. His creation--the Cherokee syllabary--helped his people learn to read and write within five years and became a principal part of their identity. This groundbreaking study traces the creation, dissemination, and evolution of Sequoyah's syllabary from script to print to digital forms. Breaking with conventional understanding, author Ellen Cushman shows that the syllabary was not based on alphabetic writing, as is often thought, but rather on Cherokee syllables and, more importantly, on Cherokee meanings.

Employing an engaging narrative approach, Cushman relates how Sequoyah created the syllabary apart from Western alphabetic models. But he called it an alphabet because he anticipated the Western assumption that only alphabetic writing is legitimate. Calling the syllabary an alphabet, though, has led to our current misunderstanding of just what it is and of the genius behind it--until now.

In her opening chapters, Cushman traces the history of Sequoyah's invention and explains the logic of the syllabary's structure and the graphic relationships among the characters, both of which might have made the system easy for native speakers to use. Later chapters address the syllabary's enduring significance, showing how it allowed Cherokees to protect, enact, and codify their knowledge and to weave non-Cherokee concepts into their language and life. The result was their enhanced ability to adapt to social change on and in Cherokee terms.

Cushman adeptly explains complex linguistic concepts in an accessible style, even as she displays impressive understanding of interrelated issues in Native American studies, colonial studies, cultural anthropology, linguistics, rhetoric, and literacy studies. Profound, like the invention it explores, "The Cherokee Syllabary" will reshape the study of Cherokee history and culture.

"Published through the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation"

German Grammar in Context presents an accessible and engaging approach to learning grammar. Each chapter opens with a real-life extract from a German newspaper, magazine, poem, book or internet source and uses this text as the starting point for explaining a particular key area of German grammar. A range of exercises follow at the end of the chapter, helping students to reinforce and test their understanding, and an answer key is also provided at the back of the book. This second edition features: Updated texts with current newspaper and magazine articles and new extracts from digital media such as chatrooms or blogs Inclusion of a wide-ranging selection of sources and topics to further students' engagement with issues relevant to contemporary Germany and Austria Clear and user-friendly coverage of grammar, aided by a list of grammatical terms A wide variety of inventive exercises designed to thoroughly build up grammatical understanding, vocabulary acquisition and effective comprehension and communication skills Helpful 'keyword boxes' translating difficult vocabulary in the texts A recommended reading section offering advice on additional grammar resources and website links German Grammar in Context will be an essential resource for intermediate to advanced students of German. It is suitable for both classroom use and independent study.

We left the media favorites (sex, politics, violence and religion) out of this text and the omission quickly begged the question: who will want to read it?Anybody who is interested in a crisp clean and prestine trek through a land of language and ideas.Anybody who is more intrigued by the life of the mind over our daily onslaught of packaged silliness.Since their inception in 1980 for high school students, these topics have taken on a life of their own. They have expanded in quality, variety, tone, color and sheer volume. Some are even funny.The Sara Bellum Review is instantly adjustable. It can move with ease from a liberal arts millieux to a syllabus for home. Schooling or indulge the rapid perusal of some waiting for the spin cycle to end in the washing machine. The material is clean, yet it will be left to the reader as to where it will fit in one's personal word robe.

Black English dialect has long been rooted in the socio-historical experience of many African Americans. When discussing the most appropriate means of promoting the success of those who speak Black English, educators essentially focus on African American learners because the dialect is most commonly associated with this ethnic group. While some may emphasize the importance of recognizing and respecting dialect differences, others place emphasis on the stigma often associated with Black English usage in mainstream society. Regardless of how one characterizes Black English, it is a dialect on which many African American students rely during their daily interactions with mainstream speakers in society. Overcoming Language Barriers lays the foundation for readers who are genuinely concerned about understanding fundamental Black English concepts and promoting the success of those who speak the dialect. In this practical resource book, Dr. Jones "thinks outside the box" by including pertinent topics such as brain-based learning in addition to focusing on dialect differences. She shares insightful data from her English language arts research study as well as practical strategies to be utilized in mainstream classrooms. The study highlights examples of Black English features and feedback from English language arts teachers across the United States regarding their perceptions of Black English usage in their classrooms. This publication is ideal for both beginning and veteran educators and researchers seeking to effect meaningful change for linguistically different students.

This new addition to the "ARBA In-depth" series provides focused help in building children's and young adult collections. More than 300 critical reviews of quality reference titles by subject experts cover reference titles for this audience; all of which have appeared in the last six editions of "American Reference Books Annual," the long-trusted source of reliable reviews of recent reference publications. Author, title, and subject indexes, as well as a contributor list, are provided.

The fourth in this series of companion volumes to "ARBA," this work is designed to assist academic, public, and school libraries in the systematic selection of suitable reference materials for their collections. Its purpose is to aid in the evaluation process by presenting more than 300 critical and evaluative reviews in all areas of children's and young adult resources.

If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues?

Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview.

Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart.

Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.

While research into intercultural teaching has grown exponentially during the past two decades, the research has primarily resorted to the use of quantitative data collection instruments and the interpretation of scores calculated through them. As such, studies in the field can seem somewhat decontextualized, ignoring in some cases setting-specific parameters. Therefore, further study is needed to bring together theory, research, and practice demonstrating how this teaching is reflected in research design and how it is undertaken in different settings. Intercultural Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Contexts is an essential reference source that provides a series of rich insights into the way intercultural education is practiced in numerous international contexts and showcases practical examples of teaching situations and classroom activities that demonstrate its impact within the classroom. Featuring research on topics such as higher education, multilingualism, and professionalism, this book is ideally designed for educators, researchers, administrators, professionals, academicians, and students seeking pedagogical guidance on intercultural teaching.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of the Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian and Latgalian), which have only marginally featured in the discourse of theoretical linguistics and linguistic typology. The aim of the book is to bridge the gap between the study of the Baltic languages, on the one hand, and the current agenda of the theoretical and typological approaches to language, on the other. The book comprises 13 articles dealing with various aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, and their interactions, plus a lengthy introduction, whose aim is to outline the state of the art in the research on the Baltic languages. The contributions are data-driven, being based on field-work, corpus research, and data published in the sources not accessible to the general linguistic audience. On the other hand, all contributions are informed in the relevant contemporary linguistic theories and in the advances of linguistic typology. Some of the contributions aim at a more detailed, accurate and theoretically informed description of the data, others look at the Baltic material from a more theoretical point of view, still others assume an areal-typological or contact perspective.

This book begins with a reflection on dichotomies in comparative studies of Chinese and Western literature and aesthetics. Critiquing an oppositional paradigm, Ming Dong Gu argues that despite linguistic and cultural differences, the two traditions share much common ground in critical theory, aesthetic thought, metaphysical conception, and reasoning. Focusing on issues of language, writing, and linguistics; metaphor, metonymy, and poetics; mimesis and representation; and lyricism, expressionism, creativity, and aesthetics, Gu demonstrates that though ways of conception and modes of expression may differ, the two traditions have cultivated similar aesthetic feelings and critical ideas capable of fusing critical and aesthetic horizons. With a two-way dialogue, this book covers a broad spectrum of critical discourses and uncovers fascinating connections among a wide range of thinkers, theorists, scholars, and aestheticians, thereby making a significant contribution to bridging the aesthetic divide and envisioning world theory and global aesthetics.