2nd Edition

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture

Edited By Hans-Georg Wolf, Frank Polzenhagen Copyright 2026
598 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

598 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture presents a comprehensive survey of research on the relationship between language and culture. Now in its second edition, it has been fully revised to provide a clear and accessible introduction to both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies in this research area. This new edition addresses the relationship between language and culture... Read more
 

Introduction, overview, and outlook

1 Language and culture: introduction to the Handbook

Farzad Sharifian, Hans-Georg Wolf, and Frank Polzenhagen

2 The future agenda for research on language and culture

Roslyn M. Frank

PART 1: The study of language and culture: the wider framework

3 Precursors and historical background

John Leavitt

4 Cognitive anthropology

Claudia Strauss

5 Cultural semiotics

Peeter Torop

6 Sociolinguistics and contact linguistics

Part A: Sociolinguistics

Meredith Marra

Part B: Contact linguistics

Anna Finzel

7 Ethnopragmatics

Cliff Goddard, Anna Gladkova, and Zhengdao Ye

8 Context in intercultural pragmatics

Istvan Kecskes

9 Cultural Linguistics

Part A: Overview

Farzad Sharifian

Part B: Recent developments

Hans‑Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen

10 Methods in the study of language and culture

Alexander Onysko and Marcus Callies

PART 2: The study of language and culture: key domains of analysis

11 Language, culture, and identity

Sandra R. Schecter

12 Language, culture, and gender

Lidia Tanaka

13 Language, culture, and politeness

Sara Mills

14 Language, culture, and interaction

Peter Eglin

15 Language, culture, and discourse

Andrew P. Carlin and Ricardo Moutinho

16 Language and subcultures

Heiko Motschenbacher

17 Language, culture, and linguistic prehistory

Patrick McConvell

18 Language, culture, and kinship systems

David B. Kronenfeld

19 Language, culture, and colour categorization

Don Dedrick

20 Language, culture, and emotion concepts

Jean‑Marc Dewaele

PART 3: Language, culture, and cognition

21 Language, culture, and embodiment

Ning Yu

22 Culture and language development

Laura Sterponi and Paul F. Lai

23 Culture and language processing

Dailyn Q. Clark and Jeanette Altarriba

24 Language and cultural scripts

Anna Wierzbicka

25 Language, culture, and metaphor

Zoltan Kovecses

26 Language, culture, and prototypicality

Frank Polzenhagen and Xiaoyan Xia

27 Language, culture, and spatial cognition

Penelope Brown

28 Language, culture, and space-time mapping

Chris Sinha and Enrique Bernárdez

PART 4: Language and culture in applied domains

29 Language, culture, and intercultural communication

Hans-Georg Wolf

30 Language, culture, and world Englishes

Andy Kirkpatrick

31 Language, culture, and second dialect learning

Ian G. Malcolm

32 Language, culture, and higher education

Sami Alhasnawi

33 Language, culture, and second‑language writing

Dwight Atkinson

34 Language, culture, and translation

Nigel Armstrong

35 Language, culture, and the workplace

Milene Oliveira

36 Language, culture, and gesture

Ulrike Schröder and Jurgen Streeck

Biography

Hans-Georg Wolf holds the chair of Development and Variation of the English Language at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He is co-editor of a series on cognitive linguistic studies in cultural contexts and serves on the editorial board of several journals focused on language and culture, as well as World Englishes.

Frank Polzenhagen is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), Germany. His research and writing focus on the study of second-language varieties of English from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective.