A friend should be able to be an attentive listener, which made semiotician Roland Barthes wonder in his intriguing dictionary of love, ‘cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?’. This volume takes on the encyclopedic task – in the sense of Umberto Eco, where an encyclopedia is a very complex sign – to explore friendship in detail, not only as a form of love but in all its complexity as a bond that connects people and forms communities. Semiotics, the study of signs and meaning-making, is used alongside insights from a wide range of friendship studies to create a far-reaching intellectual resonance, or sonority, around friendship as a central human experience.

As a study of the significance of friendship, it presents findings from friendship research across the globe, enabling new ways of thinking about friends. It includes:

• key concepts from semiotics, sociology, anthropology, and other fields, briefly explained


• major models of friendship from antiquity to contemporary societies


• proverbs and sayings about friendship from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe


• stories about famous or forgotten friends from mythology, fiction, and real history


• summaries of research on friendship from selected academic disciplines


• bibliographical references for further studies

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