In the past 10 years, there has been a tendency in Kalmykia to drift away from traditional culture, the foundation of which has been the Buddhist teaching adopted by the Kalmyks in the 17th century, and also, most directly, the Kalmyk language, which has lost its definitive importance in Kalmyk society. Young people of Kalmykia today express…

Most analyses of the sociolinguistic aspects of immigration focus on contexts where a single language is official and widely used. In bilingual Catalonia, newly arriving immigrants find themselves in a situation where the administration seeks to treat Catalan as a fully functional public language while large sectors of the local population still…

The low literacy rates in developing countries have been repeatedly problematized as a major constraint to socioeconomic development by education planners and policy makers. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant rationale for literacy development was one of promoting economic growth. In more recent years, by contrast, literacy has increasingly come…

This paper examines the links between language, social difference and political domination in the practices of parental school choice at the heart of a global city, Vancouver. Vancouver is a highly diverse city, especially in terms of language. Its inner city is replete with multiple languages whose exchange values are not equal. In this context,…

Being literate involves being able to move from the ability to read and write to include different forms of knowledge and modes of communication of the milieu (drumming, dancing, story-telling, etc.). This article examines the new literacy allowed through the existence of two types of schools (bilingual and monolingual) in Burkina Faso, in West…