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This volume brings together for the first time essays that cover all major (currently) spoken languages in the state, all major language research in Louisiana, and all sites of language activism.This allows for a cohesive, comparative understanding of the state's polyglot history and each language's place in it. The book presents work from academics and community members, providing both insider views and the views of outsider scholars with years of experience with the languages in question. The approachable style makes this appropriate for both the general public and scholars of the state and language trends.

French on Shifting Ground introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. The book outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world, and including the first published description of the way it is spoken by the American Indian population. It then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language–in this case French–is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the scientific community as well as for the people whose cultures–and identities–are literally at stake.

This book presents a series of systematic, empirically based studies of word meanings. Each chapter investigates key expressions drawn from different domains of the lexicon – concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. The examples chosen are complex and culturally important: they include the cross-linguistic semantics of basic social categories like men, women, and children, of physical qualities like hot, hard, and rough, of emotions like happiness, of words to express pain, of speech-acts including suggesting and apologising, and of abstract nouns including trauma, temperature and violence. The languages represented include English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics and a discussion of the natural semantic metalanguage methodology used throughout the book. The authors consider a wide range of methodological and analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama’s writings on happiness.