Roland S. Persson's (2012a) piece is extremely comprehensive, timely and very relevant especially in light of a growing appreciation of cultural diversity and the emergence of a global community--which is an inevitable offshoot of globalisation that goes beyond world economy and international markets. It covers multiple themes; ranging from…

In this discussion of a set of studies that fits the trope of "Indian Languages in Unexpected Places," I explore the obvious necessity of developing a relevant notion of linguistic "leakage" following a famous image from the writings of the linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir. Though in its original use, the concept applied more to the order of…

During the past two decades, field linguists have expressed serious concerns over the unprecedented rapid loss of "indigenous languages", the endangerment of many others, and the implications of these processes for the education and economic development of "indigenous populations", among other matters. The book to which this article responds is a…

Valerie Miner muses in "Writing and Teaching with Class:" "I've always carried that Miner suspicion that laboring with words is not real work . . . Should I be doing something useful?" (1993, 74). If working-class academics face uneasy negotiations between their disciplines and their home cultures, which may include deployment…

This paper presents the root causes of the resistance of mainstream European educational institutions to implementation of minority language programmes (bilingual programmes with both an official/dominant language and an immigrant minority language as media of instruction). Differential treatment of different minority languages in the mainstream…

English has become the dominant global language of communication, business, aviation, entertainment, diplomacy and the internet. Governments as well as some scholars appear to be accepting such a spread of English uncritically. However, we argue that the increasing dominance of the English language is contributing to neocolonialism by empowering…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) deserve praise for their superlative synthesis of literature relating to grammatical processing, as well as for their original contributions to this area of research. CF "explore the idea that there might be fundamental differences between child L1 and adult L2 processing." The researchers present evidence that adult second…

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…