The present study contributes to recent renewed interest in the social construction of folk linguistic knowledge and directs its focus to a multilingual workplace. The article reports on an in-depth sociolinguistic investigation in a European institution in Luxembourg. Data were collected in 2020-2021 with trainees and permanent staff in a…

Many metropolitan cities have undergone rapid demographic changes in recent years, and such changes hasten and widen linguistic diversities. Similar changes are happening in Sydney, Australia and Hamburg, Germany. These changes are most acutely felt and observed in the classrooms where multiple languages are spoken, despite a prevalent monolingual…

Breton (Brittany, France) and Lower Sorbian (Brandenburg, Germany) are two of the many endangered minority languages currently undergoing revitalization. In their cases, given that intergenerational transmission in a family setting has mostly ceased, language revitalization takes the form of educational initiatives, such as the immersion program…

This article argues that an expanded view of linguistic landscapes provides a useful metaphor for exploring language policies. Following this view, "language policy" is defined as "linguistic landscaping" (i.e., placing language policy mechanisms which, together with already placed mechanisms, construct a metaphorical…

Learning a new language after forced migration has hardly ever been studied from the perspective of children. Their viewpoint, however, gets even more important, if we want to understand the lifelong consequences of their early experiences. With this aim, we use autobiographical accounts of persons who were rescued from Nazi Germany and brought to…

This article investigates textbooks used in English classes in German schools to evaluate their relevance to current trends of teaching English as an international language. For many European students, English is no longer just a foreign language, but an important European lingua franca. Thus, we argue it is essential for the language to be…

Fewer than 15% of primary school teachers in both Germany and the UK are male. With the on-going international debate about educational performance highlighting the widening gender achievement gap between girl and boy pupils, the demand for more male teachers has become prevalent in educational discourse. Concerns have frequently been raised about…

The article studies minority language policy in the situation of an internal division within a speech community. It is based on the example of the Upper Sorbs -- a Slavic minority in Germany. The division within this community is based on language use, the level of assimilation and religion. The Catholic Upper Sorbs have maintained…

Social networking sites have become ubiquitous in our daily communicative exchanges, which has brought about new platforms of identification and opened possibilities that were out of reach for many minoritized communities. As they represent an increasing percentage of the media we consume, these sites have been considered crucial for…

This paper describes and discusses findings from an explorative study on multilingualism among university staff. In a project conducted in the University of Hamburg, 661 members of staff in administrative and technical roles have participated in a survey on their multilingual repertoires, on the usage of different languages as well as multilingual…

Study/Teach abroad experiences, are shown to impact prospective teachers' beliefs and values, offering exposure to diverse educational systems and teaching philosophies. This qualitative exploratory case study aimed to investigate the impact of the Comenius language assistantship program on the sociolinguistic perspectives and meaning schemes of…

Based on small case-study illustrations from a variety of European countries, this study aims to explore methodological aspects of the study of curriculum history by expanding its traditional research scope. In so doing, it is argued that sociolinguistic issues are essential to this discussion. The main argument is that sociolinguistics and…

This study examines the attitudes of German-speaking pupils towards Sorbian-language education and the problems these pupils indicate as an obstacle to becoming bilingual through educational settings. Based on the research carried out in the Upper Sorbian Grammar School in Bautzen/Budyšin (Germany) combining a statistical survey, in-depth…

While previous sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that children faithfully acquire probabilistic input constrained by sociolinguistic and linguistic factors (e.g., gender and socioeconomic status), research suggests children regularize inconsistent input-probabilistic input that is not sociolinguistically constrained (e.g., Hudson Kam &…

Sociolinguistic and sociocultural features of the source language can be ideally transferred to the target language when the translator's cultural background knowledge has a high overlap with the source language culture. This signifies the crucial role of national cultural distance from the source language society in the quality of translation of…