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In this paper, educational language policy is explored through the lens of linguistic neo-colonialism in Ireland in the case of learners of English as an Additional Language. The perspective of Ireland as a decolonized nation may have an impact on current language policy. Arguments for an additive approach to language and identity, language maintenance and the preservation of linguistic human rights make the case for avoiding subtractive bilingualism as a form of linguistic neo-colonialism. Social class and racism can lead to linguistic oppression that must be addressed critically by all stakeholders and policy makers at macro and micro levels. A transformation in linguistic oppression has potential to address these issues within communities. It is therefore essential that all children are afforded the opportunity to develop their language skills to the fullest extent possible, in order to gain maximum access to education and the structures and norms that constitute the society of their new community in addition to, not instead of, their home community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how language policy affects the socioeconomic development of nation states through two channels: the individual’s exposure to and (in reference to an individual’s mother tongue) linguistic distance from the official language. In a cross-country framework the article first establishes a robust and sizeable negative relationship between an official language that is distant from the local indigenous languages and proxies for human capital and health. To establish this relationship as causal, we instrument language choice with a measure of geographic distance from the origins of writing. Next, using individual level data from India and a set of 11 African countries, we provide microempirical support on the two channels—distance from and exposure to the official language—and their implications for educational, health, occupational and wealth outcomes. Finally, we suggest policy implications based on our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The article focuses on the association between the standardisation and language maintenance of two Finnic varieties in Sweden, the Meänkieli and Sweden Finnish. Information about the opportunities and challenges of Finnic varieties as well as the issue of language maintenance associated summarization the variety, is given. It highlights the aspects of formal language use, language cultivation, and the teaching targets of instruction in school adopt Standard Finnish norms. An overview on the geographic, demographic and language policy of Meänkieli, is also emphasized.

The article discusses research concerning the processes and challenges of standardization of Mirandese, an indigenous regional minority language spoken by rural communities in Miranda do Douro district and Vimioso district in the Northeastern Portuguese-Spanish border. It highlights the complementary and uncompetitive relationship between the various languages depicting the social domain pairings. Information about the major role of public administration, church, and school officials in choosing Spanish in social interactions with Spanish nationals, is also mentioned.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, European policies on languages were in a situation of flux. Between roughly 1985 and 2005 there was a relatively smooth development characterized by an implicit and explicit commitment to multilingualism. More recently, however, things have appeared rather less clear cut, both internationally and in individual countries. This paper problematizes the interplay between language and identity, which although not a new issue, takes on particular significance in the mobile, interconnected world of the 21st century. Drawing on the data collected in three major surveys in 2012, it touches upon two major issues: 1) the reality of individual multilingualism in fostering the sense of community among Europeans and as a factor for European identity formation; and 2) broadening of the traditional concept of language policy - from its narrow content as language planning of the national or official language to a broader concept including a wider range of agents, types of activities, level of explicitness and concreteness of application. Is there a need to develop specific language policies “beyond the state” in regions or more commonly in multilingual cities as its natural locus? The paper argues that the essentially liberal world view of multilingualism creating mutual understanding is rather more nuanced when it comes to reflections on the impact of language on identity and on European identity in particular. It also argues for re‑scoping and re‑thinking of the European model of multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent literature on indigenous identity politics in Latin America has emphasized the emergence of new discourses on ethnic citizenship. However, the ways in which state-sponsored efforts to validate and revitalize the Yucatec Maya language become relevant to rural Yucatecans reflect far more continuity with older local narratives about the relationship between language use and modernity. Situating contemporary engagements with multicultural language policies within a broader history of locally meaningful language practices complicates the general model of indigenous language communities that has informed many recent studies of Latin American identity politics and reframes scholarly debates that have emphasized contrasts between emergent forms of essentialism or purism and more-traditional means of identity formation. This, in turn, suggests new routes through which multicultural and multilingual policies can be conceptualized for heterogeneous communities of indigenous language speakers. [Keywords: multiculturalism, language ideology, Maya, Mexico, Yucatan]

The issue of second language acquisition by immigrants was a major political issue in Quebec in the second half of the twentieth century. In Montreal in particular, where a French-speaking majority coexisted with an English-speaking minority, recent comers had historically tended to assimilate with the numerically smaller group. After the Quiet Revolution, a movement emerged among nationalist Francophones to alter this trend and to convince allophones to join forces with the demographic majority. Recent data from the 2001 Canadian census shows that the effects of Quebec's linguistic laws are beginning to be felt more and more in Montreal, and that in this context knowledge of the French language has progressed constantly among recently arrived immigrant groups. With the steady rise in official language bilingualism and the relative maintenance of heritage languages, a new equilibrium is emerging which points to a renewed social peace and a more intense participation of immigrants in mainstream French-speaking society. La question de l'apprentissage d'une langue seconde par les immigrants a ete un enjeu politique de premiere importance au Quebec au cours de la deuxieme moitie du XXe siecle. A Montreal en particulier, ou une majorite francophone cohabitait avec une minorite anglophone, les nouveaux citoyens ont eu tendance historiquement a s'assimiler plutot du cote des locuteurs de l'anglais. Apres la Revolution tranquille, un mouvement a emerge parmi les nationalistes francophones pour modifier cette tendance et convaincre les allophones de se joindre a la majorite demographique. Des donnees recentes extraites du recensement canadien de 2001 montrent que les effets des lois linguistiques quebecoises commencent a se faire sentir de plus en plus a Montreal et que, dans ce contexte, la connaissance du francais a progresse au sein des communautes immigrantes recemment arrivees. Accompagnee d'une hausse du bilinguisme et d'une relative stabilite des langues patrimoniales non officielles, cette tendance semble augurer d'un nouvel equilibre linguistique dans la ville.

This paper argues that our understanding of the issues related to language conflicts inside business organizations would be enriched by close analysis of the conflicts that take place in the larger arena of the social sphere, of which the business organizations are a part. Taking clues from earlier studies, the paper argues that the prime reason behind linguistic conflicts is the fear of loss of linguistic identity by the linguistic minorities. It is further debated that the same factors related to the loss of linguistic identity would play a role in the business arena as well where the official language of the workplace puts its native speakers in an undue advantageous position with respect to other members who have learnt the official language as their second language. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigrants to Israel are quickly taught to assimilate through Hebrew language classes and other active training. A study of Russian immigrants at a state-run Hebrew language school shows the pressures that come to bear on immigrants to become 'real' Israelis.

The article argues that Nahuatl, the most widely spoken indigenous language in Mexico, is at risk of replacement by Spanish, the language of greater economic power, education, and social prestige. [...]

Teenlit, a genre of popular literature for adolescents, was introduced to Indonesia around the beginning of the last decade and almost immediately attracted a large readership consisting predominantly of female adolescents. Its rapid rise has invited both favourable and hostile reactions from observers. Sympathetic literary critics view young people's attraction to it as a positive process towards the development of a healthy reading and writing habit. Meanwhile, hostile critics consider it as nothing more than light fiction containing questionable moral values, written in an unacceptable style. This article examines a representative example of such criticisms as a platform for discussing the relationship between the relatively new genre of adolescent literature and the wider context of language change. It seeks to show that hostility towards teenlit reflects a concern for the maintenance of standard Indonesian as the language of literature amid a rapidly changing language situation in which a major colloquial variety of Indonesian has been gaining prominence and encroaching on domains prescriptively associated with the standard variety, such as written literature. The negative reaction is also an assertion of an idealized view of literature, which holds that the function of adolescent fiction is to educate readers on the aesthetic function of language and sound moral values. The author demonstrates that this concern arises against the backdrop of a socio-political climate in which the state, having long exerted control over language use and language development, gradually ceases to be perceived as the sole authority on language. As such, it is an articulation of a desire to safeguard the existence of a linguistic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary places Cultural Autonomy within minority rights and raises a number of important questions about Cultural Autonomy and its meaning. It points to some of the contradictions within the concept of Cultural Autonomy and questions how it relates to the enactment and implementation of language policies. In addition, Garibova explores how Cultural Autonomy relates to the concept of fairness and inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary David Marshall argues that Fishman’s concept of Cultural Autonomy, by placing power-sharing as central to the sociolinguistic enterprise, can bring about a rapprochement between positivists and critical approaches to sociolinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the legacy of Soviet Union government policy concerning language, with a particular focus on language use in the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Emphasis is given to such aspects of linguistics as alphabet, orthography, vocabulary, and language status. The enforcement of language policy regarding the teaching and speaking of the Russian language throughout the Soviet Union is analyzed.

Since the early 1990s, language policy and planning (LPP) has undergone significant theoretical shifts in how it understands policy, concurrent with corresponding shifts in understandings of language, and particularly language use, more broadly. This paper draws on recent developments within linguistics that understand language from the perspective of Vygotskian sociocultural theory, and the role of language and other sociocultural artefacts in the mediation of human activity and social practice. The purpose of this discussion is to consider the potential of sociocultural theory as the basis for a broader meta-theoretical framework to understand the interrelationship between macro and micro analyses of policy and practice within LPP. The paper concludes with a consideration of the issues this raises for methodology in the study of LPP, as well as the implications for the practice of LPP itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the need for teachers with the skills to effectively teach English Language Learner (ELL) students, Portland State University (PSU) collaborated with three Portland area community colleges and 17 school districts to develop a program to recruit and prepare bilingual/bicultural teachers. This nine-year-old program provides a career ladder for education paraprofessionals. Candidates begin their work at the community colleges or at the upper division or graduate levels at PSU depending upon their backgrounds. This article describes the program, assessment of the program, and lessons learned. To date, over 190 candidates have completed the program and 99 percent have been employed in partner school districts. Candidates, university faculty, and school district leaders express great satisfaction with the program, but they offer several suggestions for program refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nationalization of a language, such as Sanskrit in India, does not only involve the standardization of its linguistic forms, but also a sanitization of cultural notions about the language. The choice of Sanskrit as India's national language was an attempt to enable the country to function as a nation. Sanskrit served for centuries as the language of the elite.

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigates the attitudes of 555 boys and 493 girls towards the three official spoken languages used in postcolonial Hong Kong (i.e. Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The respondents started their secondary school education one year after the city was returned to the sovereignty of China from Britain. They were in their fourth year of studies at the time of this research. A questionnaire survey was conducted to find out how differently the two gender groups perceived the three target languages when they were repositioning themselves in the new sociopolitical context of Hong Kong. Informed by the quantitative results, group interviews were conducted to explore the reasons underlying the main attitudinal differences between the two genders. Similar to the research conducted in other parts of the world, female respondents were found to be consistently more positive than their male counterparts in their attitudes towards the non-native languages while male students were more positively inclined to the vernacular. Given the more accommodating attitudes of females to other languages, it is more likely that they will be the group who pushes Hong Kong forward towards a higher degree of multilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it is argued that language policy can play a central role in enabling citizens of a country to participate in the political, educational, social and economic life of that country. Or it can deny them that right. In discussions on the role of African languages, there is a tendency to confine the discussion to language in education. I argue that unless we locate the discussion in a broader context, we are not going to make much progress in extending the use of African languages beyond the home domain. The paper therefore consists of three sections. The first section looks broadly at the domains where language has an impact. The second section briefly outlines a process underway in South Africa to develop a framework for a national language policy, whilst the final section looks at the implications of this for education. Here I look at language in Education Policy in Practice. I give examples from a piece of primary research that I have conducted with Xhosa -speaking Grade 4 and Grade 7 learners who have been given pictures to describe first in Xhosa and then in English. The examples show the rich vocabulary children have when they express themselves in Xhosa and the poor vocabulary they have when they express themselves in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imposition of a one-language policy leads to more separation that the expected unification and this is evident in Kenya. Kenya has adopted English as an official language and Kiswahili as the national language. Besides cutting-off students from their mother-tongues, this language policy has only created new feelings of inadequacy. It will be more fruitful to encourage multilingual policies. Children should be educated in their mother-tongues and these language skills can later be transferred to a second language.

Language, culture, and national identity is the title of my paper, but its central subject is the situation of languages in cultures, written or spoken languages still being the main [...]

The English in India and Malaysia and the High German in Switzerland are used to trace resistance to language changes to the covert and overt initiatives of language policies. In Switzerland, a change in language policy would entail translating the Constitution as it is written in High German or Hochdeutsch. The situation is similar in India, where the shift from English cannot be effected since judges and lawyers remained schooled in English even after Independence. In Malaysia, both legal system and Islamic concepts confound attempts to be converted Malay.

Otto Santa Ana A. is a professor in the newly created César Chávez Center for Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA. He is interested in a wide range of topics including sociolinguistics, language acquisition, language evaluation, and language policy. He has a particular interest in borderland communities, ethnicity as a social category, and languages in contact. Prior to joining the UCLA community, he taught at the University of New Mexico. He has also held teaching posts at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics; the Université de Paris III; as well as in other universities and colleges. Santa Ana is also a graduate of the University of Arizona, Tucson. His contributions to Chicano Studies follow from his characterization of Chicano languages and dialects which developed from his doctoral dissertation, a cross-generational sociolinguistic study in four barrios of Los Angeles. He has published several articles and has contributed to edited volumes. His publications include: 1) "English and the Nature of the Chicano Language Setting," and 2) "Chicano English Evidence for the Exponential Hypothesis: A Variable Rule Pervades Lexical Phonology." He has recently completed an article on vowel reduction and an article on sonority in Chicano English, and he is about to launch two large-scale studies, one on the sociolinguistic construction of ethnicity in the English of Los Angeles Chicanos, and the other, a comparative study of spoken vernaculars, Mexican and Chicano Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the language policy of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The author argues that making French the national language after the country's independence has had a negative effect on the growth of literature in the national languages.