This book offers a comprehensive, up-to-date, critical introduction to the field of intercultural communication from a discourse-analytic and sociolinguistic perspective. Through increased migration, tourism and global media, people with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds are in contact more now than ever before. The ubiquity of cultural and linguistic contact, mergers and hybrids has resulted in a strong interest in intercultural communication, both outside and inside academia.Intercultural Communication makes two key contributions to the field. Firstly, with its grounding in discourse analysis and anthropological linguistics treats cultural identity, difference and similarity as discursive constructions. Secondly, with its grounding in sociolinguistics, particularly bilingualism studies, it highlights the use of different languages and/or language varieties as a central aspect of intercultural communication, and illuminates the differential prestige of languages and language varieties, and the varying access that speakers have to them.Key features: *Innovative approach to a well-established and burgeoning field*International appeal with case studies from around the world*Reader-friendly, accessible and often conversational style*Each chapter includes learning objectives, key points, exercises and suggestions for further reading.

Ingrid Piller is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She has published widely on the sociolinguistics of language learning, multilingualism and intercultural communication and blogs about her research at www.languageonthembve.org: