Abstract

Do bi- and multilinguals perceive themselves differently in their respective languages? Do they experience different emotions? How do they express emotions and do they have a favourite language for emotional expression? How are emotion words and concepts represented in the bi- and multilingual lexicons? This ground-breaking book opens up a new field of study, bilingualism and emotions, and provides intriguing answers to these and many related questions.

This volume brings together the latest thinking in a relatively new area of research, that of multilingualism and emotions.

Learning new languages tends to involve emotions, and for many bi-lingual and multi-lingual people the different languages they speak make different emotional connections for them. Though these matters were known about, only recently have deeper understandings have been sought, and found. This fine volume is among the welcome first fruits of research on these issues. It is a timely book that will be welcome to all who are interested in language and its emotional implications.

This is a very cohesive piece of work with various chapters complementing each other. This is a fascinating book that I would recommend highly to anyone interested in bilingualism.

This fascinating collection of papers makes an important contribution to the emerging field of bilingualism and emotions that Pavlenko has spearheaded. They offer rare insights into the relations of language, cognition and affect from various perspectives in cognitive and social psychology…. By stressing the crucial importance of desire and arousal in language, as opposed to the more instrumental concept of motivation, this book should have wide ranging implications for the study of second language acquisition and bilingualism.

The present collection of chapters covers a wide spectrum of issues in the field of emotions and bilingualism. The volume is highly recommended to those interested in learning about emotions in bilingualism and L2 learning as well as those interested in undertaking research in this important new area.

Dr. Aneta Pavlenko is an Associate Professor at the College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, US. She has lectured widely in Europe, North America, and Japan, and published numerous scientific articles and book chapters on sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. She is an author of Emotions and Multilingualism (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a co-editor of three volumes, Multilingualism, Second Language Learning, and Gender (Mouton de Gruyter, 2001), Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Matters, 2004), and Gender and English Language Learners (TESOL, 2004).