Communicating with Asia brings together an international team of leading researchers to discuss South, South-East, East and Central Asia, and explore Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi-Urdu, Malay, and Russian as major languages. The volume locates English inside a number of national, regional or lingua franca contexts and illustrates the way it develops in such contact situations. Local dynamics affecting languages in contact and cultural links of languages are dealt with, such as educational-political issues and tensions between conflicting norms. In today's global world, where the continent is an increasing area of focus, it is vital to explore what it means to 'understand' Asian cultures through English and other languages. This important new study will be of interest to students and researchers working in the fields of regional studies, English as a global language, Asian languages and cultural studies.

Since the explosion of multimedia, the creation and promotion of multimedia clusters has become a target for regional development strategies across the globe. This work offers the first inter-regional comparison of the multimedia industry.
Analysing thirteen American, European and Asian regions, leading academics examine factors which drive the emergence of multimedia clusters and processes by which they are formed,

Communicating with Asia brings together an international team of leading researchers to discuss South, South-East, East and Central Asia, and explore Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi-Urdu, Malay, and Russian as major languages. The volume locates English inside a number of national, regional or lingua franca contexts and illustrates the way it develops in such contact situations. Local dynamics affecting languages in contact and cultural links of languages are dealt with, such as educational-political issues and tensions between conflicting norms. In today's global world, where the continent is an increasing area of focus, it is vital to explore what it means to 'understand' Asian cultures through English and other languages. This important new study will be of interest to students and researchers working in the fields of regional studies, English as a global language, Asian languages and cultural studies.

The book is the first of its kind to establish Cognitive Linguistics as a research paradigm within the field of world Englishes. The authors survey the main tenets of both areas of linguistic enquiry and suggest that the theoretical and methodological apparatus developed both within Cognitive Linguistics generally and within its novel sub-discipline Cognitive Sociolinguistics can overcome certain limitations inherent in traditional approaches to cultural variation in language. They present a case study of the linguistic realization of the cultural model of community in African English as an exemplar for the investigation of cultural models in other varieties of English. Corpus-linguistic methods are combined with conceptual metaphor analysis and blending theory to elucidate a vast network of conceptualizations salient to speakers of African English. The findings, based on computer corpora and a range of additional sources, are discussed against the background of work in anthropology, religious studies, and political science. The book also reflects on the role of English in intercultural communication and concludes with a comparison of Cognitive Linguistics and pragmatic functionalism, placing the former in the wider framework of a hermeneutic philosophy that stresses dialogic understanding.

The multilingual situation in Cameroon and the status of English as a co-official language constitute a unique and fascinating case for sociolinguistic investigation. Drawing from first-hand material, the author investigates several aspects of this complex configuration, including the historical development of English in Cameroon, the various languages and lingua franca areas, the linguistic policy, the de facto status of English and the situation in the anglophone provinces. The speech community of the Anglophones is highlighted as a rare example of an ethnicity tied to the second language. Apart from important sociolinguistic findings, the work includes a novel, corpus-based analysis of Cameroon English. Certain lexical phenomena are explained by the cognitive coding of culture - particularly the African cultural model of community, which also underlies the self-perception of the Anglophones - a perspective hitherto neglected in the study of the New Englishes.

This volume is a collection of articles dealing with African, in particular West African, varieties of English, including English-based Pidgins and Creole languages, some of which have received only scant attention so far. A wide range of different aspects are highlighted: the role of the varieties discussed in their respective linguistic situations, evidence of the acculturation of English in an African context, lexical and grammatical characteristics, questions of language and education policy, and--for the first time--a lexical comparison of two developing national varieties.