Taking an up-to-date and truly global approach, this volume presents a wide range of phenomena in politeness research, and discusses key developments in the field. Covering eight major world languages as well as several language varieties, a team of leading scholars provide a multilingual and multicultural perspective on various speech acts and emic conceptualisations of politeness, and a diachronic view of the field. Most significantly, the volume focuses on the latest trends in the field, such as metapragmatic approaches to im/politeness, politeness and globalization, politeness in computer mediated communication, and politeness and prosody, spanning a wide range of methodologies and types of data, including naturally occurring conversations, role plays, email messages, social media, online discussion forums, ethnographic interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, experiments and language corpora.