The great diversity of microbial life is the remaining major reservoir of unknown biological diversity on earth. To understand this vast, but largely unperceived diversity with its untapped genetic, enzymatic and industrial potential, microbial systematics is undergoing a revolutionary change in its approach to describe novel taxa based on genomic/envirogenomic information. The characterization of an organism is no longer bounded by methodological barriers, and it is now possible to fully sequence the whole genome of a strain to study individual genes, or to examine the genetic information by using different techniques. In fact, application of genomics is helping not only to provide a better understanding of the boundaries of genera and higher levels of classification, but also to refine our definition of the species concept. In addition, increased understanding of phylogeny is allowing to predict the genetic potential of microorganisms for biotechnological applications and adaptation to environmental changes. The present Research Topic on “Microbial Taxonomy, Phylogeny and Biodiversity” compiles a collection of papers covering the use of genomic sequence data in microbial taxonomy and systematics, including evolutionary relatedness of microorganisms; application of comparative genomics in systematic studies; or metagenomic approaches for biodiversity studies. We hope that this eBook incentives and encourages researchers for future discussions on microbial taxonomy and phylogenetics.

An exploration of Spanish culture in Spain and the Americas traces the social, political, and economic forces that created that culture.

Studies in Japanese Bilingualism helps dissolve the myth of Japanese homogeneity by explaining the history of this construct and offering twelve empirical studies on different facets of language contact in Japan, including Ainu revitalisation, Korean language maintenance, creative use of Ryukyuan languages in Okinawa, English immersion, and language use by Nikkei immigrants, Chinese "War Orphans" and bicultural children, as well as codeswitching and language attrition in Japanese contexts.

Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.

This book addresses the issue of language contact in the context of child language acquisition. Elizabeth Lanza examines in detail the simultaneous acquisition of Norwegian and English by two first-born children in families living in Norway in which the mother is American and the father Norwegian. She connects psycholinguistic arguments with sociolinguistic evidence, adding a much-needed dimension of real language-use in context to the psycholinguistic studies which have dominated the field. She draws upon evidence from other studies to support her claims concerning language dominance and the child's differentiation between the two languages in relation to the situation, interlocutor, and the communicative demands of the context. She also addresses the question of whether or not the language mixing of infant bilingualism is conceptually different from the codeswitching of older bilinguals, thus helping to bridge the gap between these two fields of study.

In a world of increasing migration and technological progress, multilingual communication has become the rule rather than the exception. This book reflects the growing interest in understanding communication between members of different linguistic groups and contains a collection of original papers by members of the German Science Foundation's research center on multilingualism at Hamburg University and by international experts, offering an overview of the most important research fields in multilingual communication. The book is divided into four sections dealing with interpreting and translation, code-switching in various institutional contexts, two important strands of multilingual communication: rapport and politeness, and contrastive studies of Japanese and German grammar and discourse. The editors' preface presents the relevant theoretical and methodological background to the issues discussed in this book and points to useful directions for future research.

This book introduces the way languages are used in Japanese-English interlingual families in Japan and explains what factors influence their language choice, with the aim of arriving at a predictive model of language use. It also proposes a taxonomy of interlingual family types and a typological model of language use.