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Argues that foreign language training, especially the learning of English, is vital to the effectiveness of North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) peace-support operations and the Alliance's enlargement and Partnership activities. Poor language skills can lead to mistakes in peace-support operations resulting in casualties and may reduce the influence of some nations and create unnecessary tension and frustration; and more must be done to train and retain soldiers with relevant skills for international assignments.

This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modern philosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from Locke to Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of canonical figures such as Leibniz, Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Davidson, as well as those of Condillac, Humboldt, Chomsky, and Derrida. Michael Losonsky argues that the philosophy of language begins with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He shows how the history of the philosophy of language in the modern period is marked by a dichotomy between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language and that modern philosophy has not been able to integrate these two aspects of human language. Language as a human activity and language as a syntactic and semantic system remain distinct and competing focal points, although the interplay between these points of view has driven the development of the philosophy of language

Linguistic anthropological theories and methods have enriched our understanding of education. Almost all education is mediated by language, and linguistic anthropologists use both precise linguistic analyses and powerful anthropological theories to describe how educational language use establishes important social relations. Because educational institutions influence processes of concern to anthropologists—including the production of differentially valued identities, the circulation and transformation of cultural models, and nation states' establishment of official peoples—linguistic anthropological research on education also contributes to cultural and linguistic anthropology more generally. This article defines linguistic anthropology through its focus on language form, use, ideology, and domain, and it reviews linguistic anthropological research that focuses on these four aspects of educational language use.

The Caucasus is characterized by a relatively high level of linguistic diversity, whether measured in terms of number of languages, number of language families, or structural properties. This is in stark contrast to low levels of linguistic diversity in neighboring areas (Europe, the Middle East), although the Caucasus does not reach such high levels of linguistic diversity as are found in New Guinea. There is even a variation between greater diversity in the North Caucasus and less diversity in the South Caucasus. Illustrative structural properties show not only idiosyncratic properties of individual languages and families but also features that have spread across the boundaries separating languages and families, sometimes with variation across languages with regard to finer points of detail, although few features characterize the Caucasus as a single linguistic area. Social factors have probably played at least as important a role as has geography in the development of linguistic diversity in the Caucasus.

Necrolinguisticsrefers tolinguistic-death-in-life, a situation in which languages are incarcerated, leaving folk in linguistic limbo. It names the process by which people come to lack the ability to use at least one language well, and includes those who are tongue-locked because their languages are incarcerated in one or more ways. In illustrating how and why the linguistic experience of Black folk inspires the termnecrolinguistics, examples from slavery, colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, and neocolonialism are provided to document the reality oflinguistic-death-in-life. The main assumption of this study is that we can investigate the humanism of institutions belonging to any epoch, regime, or society through its linguistic posture and practice. It is noted that many sub-Saharan African languages are on death row, with many of its speakers stranded in semilingualism (or plummeting linguistic competence), peculiar kinds of monolingualism, or a kind of unilateral bilingualism,asymmetrical bilingualism. Each of these states is elaborated using examples: a native American, "White Thunder" (semilingualism); Jacques Derrida, a Franco-Maghrebian Jew (discordant monolingualism); and the august personality of Léopold Sédar Senghor (unilateral bilingualism). But the paper ends on a bright note, recognizing that, though the linguistic muzzle muffles Black culture and humanity, the resilience of Black folk is evident through their development of patois, pidgins, and creoles.

This comprehensive book offers insightful crossnational and crosscontinental perspectives on mapping linguistic diversity in a variety of multicultural contexts, both in Europe and abroad, and in both the private and public domain, particularly in terms of spoken languages at home and visual languages on the street. Methodological issues and empirical outcomes are explored for a variety of European and non-European countries and languages.