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.

Approaches to Language, Culture and Cognition aims to bring cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology closer together, calling for further investigations of language and culture from cognitively-informed perspectives against the backdrop of the current trend of linguistic anthropology.

The intensification of contacts between cultures and languages has a major impact on all social spheres today. Multiculturalism and multilingualism are important elements of the local, regional, national and global community. Much of the world’s conflict stems from the contrast between globalization and nationalism, fuelled by religions, racial divisions, traditions and other cultural particularities. Focusing mainly on the situation in Central and South-eastern Europe, this book addresses how cultural identities develop through tourism, education, literature and other social fields, and how language and literature teaching should be planned in this context. It consists of the following sections: Language, Culture and Tourism; Interculturalism, Multilingualism and Approaches to Language Learning; and Culture in Literature and Translation. The volume will be of interest to teachers and researchers of cultural and tourism studies, linguistics and language learning, literary studies and translation, while also addressing wider readers interested in contemporary intercultural society.

In this book, Andrew J. Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart delineate the relationship between “language in particular” and “culture in general” by focusing on language as both social practice and a means of classifying and interpreting the world. A traditional linguistic approach to a focus on language is illuminated by their anthropological emphasis on the embodiment of relationships and experience. In the book, the body is placed in the foreground for understanding language in culture, which helps in turn to understand how it enables us to adapt to the world of lived material experience. Written in an accessible style and drawing on an extensive corpus of primary field research from Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Japan, Taiwan, Scotland, and Ireland, Strathern and Stewart present a world anthropology which links together European, North American, and Asia-Pacific approaches to the topic. Students and scholars alike of sociocultual anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and linguistics will benefit from this engaging work on how the various components of our culture are informed and shaped through language.

This book provides a linguistic and cultural profile of the Polish diasporic communities in three different European countries: Ireland, France and Austria. The eight contributing chapters present original research on the acquisition and use of the languages of the respective host communities and also explore related elements of cultural acquisition. A number of aspects of second language acquisition are considered, notably the acquisition of phonology, lexicon and discourse, as well as aspects of sociolinguistic competence. In addition, varying approaches and research methods are reported on, each of which was chosen in consideration of the particular research issue addressed and the particular circumstances under which the research was carried out. These range from psycholinguistic approaches to second language acquisition to variationist approaches, and include both quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

Language and culture are concepts increasingly found at the heart of developments in applied linguistics and related fields. Taken together, they can provide interesting and useful insights into the nature of language acquisition and expression. In this volume, Joan Kelly Hall gives a perspective on the nature of language and culture looking at how the use of language in real-world situations helps us understand how language is used to construct our social and cultural worlds.The conceptual maps on the nature of language, culture and learning provided in this text help orient readers to some current theoretical and practical activities taking place in applied linguistics. They also help them begin to chart their own explorations in the teaching and researching of language and culture.

The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life of communities. Promoting a broad vision of the subject, spanning a range of disciplines from linguistics to biology, from psychology to sociology and philosophy, this authoritative handbook is an essential reference guide for students and researchers working on language and culture across the social sciences.