The book presents a new theory of the relationship between language and culture in a transnational and global perspective. The view is that languages spread across cultures, and cultures spread across languages, or in other words, that linguistic and cultural practices flow through social networks in the world along partially different paths.

Karen Risager is Dr.Phil and Professor in Cultural Encounters at the Department of Language and Culture, Roskilde University, Denmark. She has conducted interdisciplinary research for thirty years within the fields of language and culture teaching, cultural studies and sociolinguistics, internationalisation and intercultural competence, and the language and cultural learning of adult migrants.