Metaphors of Multilingualism: Changing Attitudes towards Language Diversity in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy

This book is the first extensive attempt to provide a critical overview of the key metaphors that organize current perceptions of multilingualism. Instead of an exhaustive list of possible metaphors of multilingualism, the emphasis is on three closely interrelated and overlapping clusters that play a central role in both paradigms: organic metaphors of the body, kinship and gender metaphors, as well as spatial metaphors. The examples are taken from different languages, among them French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

This is ground-breaking reading for scholars and researchers in the fields of linguistics, literature, philosophy, media studies, anthropology, history and cultural studies.