The languages of Western Asia belong to a variety of language families, including Indo-European, Kartvelian, Semitic, and Turkic, but share numerous features on account of being in areal contact over many centuries. This volume presents descriptions of the modern languages, contributed by leading specialists, and evaluates similarities across the languages that may have arisen by areal contact. It begins with an introductory chapter presenting an overview of the various genetic groupings in the region and summarizing some of the significant features and issues relating to language contact. In the core of the volume the presentation of the languages is divided into five contact areas, which include (i) eastern Anatolia and northwestern Iran, (ii) northern Iraq, (iii) western Iran, (iv) the Caspian region and south Azerbaijan, and (v) the Caucasian rim and southern Black Sea coast. Each section contains chapters devoted to the languages of the area preceded by an introductory section that highlights significant contact phenomena. The volume is rounded off by an appendix with basic lexical items across a selection of the languages. The handbook features contributions by Erik Anonby, Denise Bailey, Christiane Bulut, David Erschler, Geoffrey Haig, Geoffrey Khan, Rene Lacroix, Parvin Mahmoudveysi, Hrach Martirosyan, Ludwig Paul, Stephan Procházka, Laurentia Schreiber, Don Stilo, Mortaza Taheri-Ardali, Christina van der Wal Anonby.

A brilliant historical survey of the development of language in the West, translated from the French by Frances Partridge. When did men stop speaking Latin? How did the actions of society or religion influence vocabulary? What effect did the conquest of the Anglo-Saxon countries by William the Conqueror and his French-speaking knights have on language? Speech and writing play a fundamental part in man's activities. Social life is inconceivable without some system of signs enabling us to communicate with each other, and language is chief among these signs. From Cicero to Gutenberg, WESTERN LANGUAGES AD 100 - 1500 shows how it is impossible to claim any real understanding of the development of the West without knowing about the development of its languages.

This book offers a comparative approach within a general framework of studies on minority languages of Western Europe and Russia and former Soviet space, focusing on linguistic, legal and categorization aspects. It is connected to a comparative study of the semantic contents of the terms referring to the different categories of these languages. The volume features multidisciplinary approaches, first linguistic (sociolinguistic and semantic) and legal, and investigates the limits of country-to-country comparisons, mirroring cases from France, Spain, and China with their counterparts from Soviet and later Russian configurations. Special examples, from a region as Ingria and a country as Tajikistan, help to contextualize this approach. In addition, the notion of migration languages, also minority languages, is studied in bilingual contexts, both from external (German, Greek, Chinese ...) and internal origins (Chuvash), linked to the urbanization in contemporary societies that has fostered the presence of these languages in major cities.

Based on Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages, this is a key guide to one of the major language families. The areas covered include Germanic languages, English, and Romance languages.

This book provides an overview of the issues surrounding language loss. It brings together work by theoretical linguists, field linguists, and non-linguist members of minority communities to provide an integrated view of how language is lost, from sociological and economic as well as from linguistic perspectives. The contributions to the volume fall into four categories. The chapters by Dorian and Grenoble and Whaley provide an overview of language endangerment. Grinevald, England, Jacobs, and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer describe the situation confronting threatened languages from both a linguistic and sociological perspective. The understudied issue of what (beyond a linguistic system) can be lost as a language ceases to be spoken is addressed by Mithun, Hale, Jocks, and Woodbury. In the last section, Kapanga, Myers-Scotton, and Vakhtin consider the linguistic processes which underlie language attrition.

"This collection of papers on contrastive semantics and pragmatics has developed out of talks given at the Third International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at the ... Hongkou Campus of Shanghai International Studies University ... in 2005."--