Key Terms in Language and Culture is a new collection of 75 short original essays written by leading scholars in linguistic anthropology and related fields, and covering the major issues in the contemporary study of language and culture. Together these essays provide a lexicon of language from an anthropological perspective. Each essay includes a brief description of a key concept, the issues associated with the concept, and the major contributions to its study. There is a set of suggested readings at the end of each essay that provides readers with a good starting point for a further study.

Alessandro Duranti is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA and author of a number of books, including Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (edited with Charles Goodwin, 1992), From Grammar to Politics: Linguistic Anthropology in a Western Samoan Village (1994), and Linguistic Anthropology (1997). In 1999 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the UCLA Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He is a former president of the Society of Linguistic Anthropology and current editor of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.