French is used on every continent, spoken not only in France but also in Belgium, Switzerland, North America, the Caribbean, Polynesia and Africa. This... is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the structure of French, suitable for those with little prior knowledge of linguistics or of the French Language. It clearly introduces the language's history, phonetics (pronunciation), phonology (sound system), morpho-syntax (how words and sentences are formed), pragmatics (how speakers express meaning), and lexicology (the study of word composition and derivation) - with each chapter showing how these aspects are subject to regional and social variation. English translations are provided for all examples, and the book contains an extensive bilingual glossary of linguistic terms, and numerous exercises and essay questions in every chapter. French: A Linguistic Introduction will be welcomed by advanced language learners, and by linguists studying the structure of this important language.

In this study, Bennigsen and Wimbush trace the development of the doctrine of national communism in Central Asia and the Caucasus. At the heart of this... doctrine—as elaborated by the Volga Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan Galiev—was the concept of "proletarian nations," as opposed to the traditional notion of a working class. With such ideological innovations, Sultan Galiev and his contemporaries were able to reconcile Marxist nationalisms and Islam and devise an "Eastern strategy" whereby the national revolution was to be spread.The authors show that the ideas of Muslim national communism persist in the land of their birth and have spread to such developing societies as China, Algeria, and Indonesia. This doctrine is an important factor in the ideological split and increasing tensions between industrial and nonindustrial nations, East and West, and now North and South, which grip the world communist movement.

From mad cows to McDonaldization to genetically modified maize, European food scares and controversies at the turn of the millennium provoked anxieties... about the perils hidden in an increasingly industrialized, internationalized food supply. These food fears have cast a shadow as long as Africa, where farmers struggle to meet European demand for the certifiably clean green bean. But the trade in fresh foods between Africa and Europe is hardly uniform. Britain and France still do business mostly with their former colonies, in ways that differ as dramatically as their national cuisines. The British buy their "baby veg" from industrial-scale farms, pre-packaged and pre-trimmed; the French, meanwhile, prefer their green beans naked, and produced by peasants. Managers and technologists coordinate the baby veg trade between Anglophone Africa and Britain, whereas an assortment of commercants and self-styled agro-entrepreneurs run the French bean trade. Globalization, then, has not erased cultural difference in the world of food and trade, but instead has stretched it to a transnational scale.French Beans and Food Scares explores the cultural economies of two "non-traditional" commodity trades between Africa and Europe--one anglophone, the other francophone--in order to show not only why they differ but also how both have felt the fall-out of the wealthy world's food scares. In a voyage that begins in the mid-19th century and ends in the early 21st, passing by way of Paris, London, Burkina Faso and Zambia, French Beans and Food Scares illuminates the daily work of exporters, importers and other invisible intermediaries in the global fresh food economy. These intermediaries' accounts provide a unique perspective on the practical and ethical challenges of globalized food trading in an anxious age. They also show how postcolonial ties shape not only different societies' geographies of food supply, but also their very ideas about what makes food good.

The French gave us the term bourgeois, and then argued endlessly about what it meant. "Of or pertaining to the French middle classes," according to the... Oxford English Dictionary. But it is not a simple matter of social class. To be bourgeois one must master a system of words, gestures and objects that define a way of life, a particular culture. It requires the exercise of self-control, and the ritualization of daily routines. This witty, observant ethnography decodes the culture that dominates France.

The author describes the various ideas that may be called chivalric, illustrates their nature and content from contemporary literature, and attempts to... show what effect they had on the ethical principles and practices of the feudal nobility.