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It is instructive to interpret patterns of language use in light of the interaction between language use and an individual's awareness of, and resistance towards, linguistic hegemony. While heritage language maintenance is often described as language use motivated by antihegemonic ideologies, this paper suggests that the paradox of the resistance to linguistic hegemony is that in order to be successful, this resistance necessitates acquiescence to this hegemony on a certain level, namely proficiency in the dominant language. This paper contends that a key element influencing the dynamic between these existing factors and language maintenance is the speaker's awareness of, and response to, the paradox of the resistance to linguistic hegemony. Awareness of and conviction towards this paradox seems to supply a dynamic in an individual's conviction towards heritage language maintenance. This paper reports the results of a study that examined this interaction in the case studies of families maintaining Spanish across generations in a rural town in upstate New York, USA. The displays of power illustrated on a personal exchange level, on the media level, and within institutions seem to illuminate the awareness of and response to the paradox of linguistic hegemony — successful resistance that leads to heritage language maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports how authors use Spanish in award-winning Latinx children's picturebooks in the USA. Teachers, families, and librarians use these books to support heritage language and culture or to broaden children's understanding of cultures other than their own. Thus, how these books use Spanish matters because of the potential of these books to promote cultural and linguistic diversity to children. This study investigated how authors used Spanish, which characters spoke Spanish, and what language ideologies texts explicitly communicate. Across 9 books (award winners between 2010 and 2015), there were 78 instances of Spanish use, and 21 of these were complete sentences or exclamations. The books provided a high level of support for understanding Spanish. Supports include immediate translation, appositive explanations, contextual cues, and picture cues, with little use of fluid translanguaging, which more approximates the communicative practices of bilingual communities. The paper concludes with implications for teachers to develop critical language awareness among students in response to literature and suggestions for authors and publishers to represent Spanish-speaking communities in children's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on speakers' rationalisations of their everyday linguistic choices as members of a multilingual academic department in the US. Given the monolingual macro-context, the myriad of native languages spoken by participants, and the professional stake in language competence, the question of how speakers arrive at language choices is examined through in-depth interviews with participants (n=12). Results indicate that participant dyads characteristically have a dominant language, but occasionally switch to the non-dominant variety. While most of the factors and motivations speakers identify can be situated in existing frameworks for code choice, my central argument is that community-wide explanations are inadequate for this group of speakers. Rather, I argue that micro-norms characterising interlocutor dyads emerge through the negotiation of perceived norms, cultural beliefs and language preferences. An important feature of dyadic norms is their mutability, within situations as well as across time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global population flows leave some social groups dislocated from their home territories and languages. Under these conditions processes of ethnolinguistic identification can become complex and the use of a home language can take on new symbolic values. We consider the case of Welsh-affiliating people in the United States of America, and the use of the Welsh language in one particular, long-running Welsh American community newspaper, Y Drych (The Mirror). Quite differently from its earliest forms in the second half of the 19th century, Y Drych nowadays positions the Welsh language as a richly iconic resource, available for ceremonial and celebratory social purposes — to celebrate Welshness at a remove from 'the homeland'. We interpret the use of Welsh in Y Drych as a form of language display, and as part of a process of retraditionalisation. Linguistic and cultural elements of 'old Wales' are re-embedded into Welsh-American consciousness and practices, in ways that might be paralleled in other sociolinguistic diasporas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]