New York Times bestselling author Robert Asprin and Jody Lynn Nye up the ante in this tale of dragons in the Big Easy… As head dragon and owner of a successful gambling operation in New Orleans, Griffen McCandles has a lot on his plate. Especially since the Krewe of Fafnir—a society of dragons—has asked him to be the king of its Mardi Gras parade. Being the king is a huge honor, and despite the extra responsibilities, Griffen can’t resist the krewe’s offer to lead the biggest party of the year. But not everyone is happy with Griffen’s new leadership status. A group of powerful dragons is conspiring to bankrupt his business, from the inside out. And when a young dragon in Griffen’s employ is murdered, it becomes clear that certain dragons will stop at nothing to dethrone the new king…

The Dravidian language family is the world's fourth largest with nearly 250 million speakers across South Asia from Pakistan to Nepal, from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka. This authoritative reference source provides a unique description of the languages, covering their grammatical structure and historical development, plus sociolinguistic features. Each chapter combines a modern linguistic perspective with traditional historical linguistics, and a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. New to this edition are chapters on Beṭṭa Kuṟumba, Kuṛux, Kūvi and Malayāḷam, and enlarged sections in various existing chapters, as well as updated bibliographies and demographic data throughout. The Dravidian Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, and will also be of interest to readers in the fields of comparative literature, areal linguistics and South Asian studies.

A convenient, portable paperback derived from the acclaimed Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages.

A young Shona girl escapes an arranged marriage by converting to Christianity, becoming a servant and student to an African Evangelical. As anti-European sentiments spread throughout the native population, she is forced to choose between her family's traditions and her newfound faith.

This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. It offers linguistic and sociohistorical substantiation for a regional Eastern Polynesian-based pidgin, and challenges conventional Eurocentric assumptions about early colonial contact in the eastern Pacific by arguing that Maritime Polynesian Pidgin preceded the introduction of Pidgin English by as much as a century. Emanuel J. Drechsel not only opens up new methodological avenues for historical-sociolinguistic research in Oceania by a combination of philology and ethnohistory, but also gives greater recognition to Pacific Islanders in early contact between cultures. Students and researchers working on language contact, language typology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will want to read this book. It redefines our understanding of how Europeans and Americans interacted with Pacific Islanders in Eastern Polynesia during early encounters and offers an alternative model of language contact.