In today’s global commerce and communication, linguistic diversity is in steady decline across the world as speakers of smaller languages adopt dominant forms. While this phenomenon, known as ‘language shift’, is usually regarded as a loss, this book adopts a different angle and addresses the following questions: What difference does using a new language make to the way speakers communicate in everyday life? Can the grammatical and lexical architectures of individual languages influence what speakers express? In other words, to what extent does adopting a new language alter speakers’ day-to-day communication practices, and in turn, perhaps, their social life and world views? To answer these questions, this book studies the expression of emotions in two languages on each side of a shift: Kriol, an English-based creole spoken in northern Australia, and Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, non-Pama-Nyungan), an Australian Aboriginal language that is being replaced by Kriol. This volume is the first to explore the influence of the formal properties of language on the expression of emotions, as well as the first description of the linguistic encoding of emotions in a creole language. The cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists.

This is the very first publication mapping onomatopoeia in the languages of the world. The publication provides a comprehensive, multi-level description of onomatopoeia in the world’s languages. The sample covers six macro-areas defined in the WALS: Euroasia, Africa, South America, North America, Australia, Papunesia. Each language-descriptive chapter specifies phonological, morphological, word-formation, semantic, and syntactic properties of onomatopoeia in the particular language. Furthermore, it provides information about the approach to onomatopoeia in individual linguistic traditions, the sources of data on onomatopoeia, the place and the function of onomatopoeia in the system of each language.

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.

Anger is one of the basic emotions of human emotional experience, informing and guiding many of our choices and actions. Although it has received considerable scholarly attention in a number of disciplines, including linguistics, a basic question has still remained unresolved: why do variations in the folk model of anger exist across languages if it is indeed a basic emotion rooted in largely universal bodily experience? By drawing on a wide selection of comparable linguistic data from dozens of languages (including a number of less-researched languages), this volume provides the most comprehensive account of what is universal and what is variable in the folk model of anger – and why. It also investigates the role that metonymies might play in the emergence of anger-related metaphors and in what ways context influences or shapes anger metaphors and thereby the resulting folk model of anger. No such volume exists in the (cognitive) linguistic literature on anger – or on emotions for that matter. The book is thus an essential contribution to the study of anger and will serve as basic reading for any researcher interested in how the conceptualization of anger is constructed via the interplay of bodily experience, language and the larger cultural context.

A concise, accessible introduction to language endangerment and why it is one of the most urgent challenges of our times. 58% of the world’s languages—or, approximately 4,000 languages—are endangered. When we break this figure down, we realize that roughly ten percent of languages have fewer than ten language keepers. And, if one language stops being used every three months, this means that in the next 100 years, if we do nothing, 400 more languages will become dormant. In Endangered Languages, Evangelia Adamou, a specialist of endangered languages and a learner of her own community language, Nashta, offers a sobering look at language endangerment and what is truly lost when a language disappears from usage. Combining recent advances from the Western scientific tradition—from the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language attrition, population genetics, and natural language processing—and insights from Indigenous epistemology, theory, and ethics, Adamou examines a wealth of issues surrounding endangered languages. She discusses where endangered languages are found, including how they are faring in a digital world, why these languages are no longer used, and how communities can reclaim languages and keep them strong. Adamou also explains the impact of language continuity on community and individual health and well-being, the importance of language transmission in cultural transmission, and why language rights are essentially human rights. Drawing on varied examples from the Wampanoag Nation to Wales, Endangered Languages offers a powerful reminder of the crucial role every language has in the vitality and well-being of individuals, communities, and our world.

This book explores language maintenance and development in the linguistic lives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants as they navigate migration and diaspora, highlighting the role of women in acting as custodians and gate-keepers of family languages towards creating a sense of home. The volume features an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on work from narrative, storytelling, literary studies, and linguistic anthropology, as well as interviews with multiple generations of immigrant families, to reflect on the ways these families foster a sense of home and maintain connections to their homelands through language. Robinson showcases the voices of a diverse range of families to examine the choices women in immigrant families make between the use of family languages, dominant community languages, or a mix of the two. The volume enhances our understanding of the ways in which immigrants navigate the linguistic landscapes of home and community amid migration and diaspora. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and gender, and language and migration.

The series Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction.