The global COVID-19 pandemic has put into high relief the need for better remote communication and collaboration tools, but also serves as an opportunity to focus on building community capacity and promoting greater community agency in the language documentation process. This paper describes a method for remotely supporting and monitoring a…

We propose that linguists and political scientists develop an interdisciplinary and ethical research strategy for studying the relationships between language endangerment and political conflict. A leading cause of language endangerment is political violence driven by outside actors who expropriate land, extract resources, and displace individuals,…

Discusses an interview focusing on important topics relevant to sociolinguistics and language minorities. Points out that one topic, ethnicity, is among many of the urban phenomena central to the study of linguistics as well as ethnic minorities and that a discussion of sociolinguistics and language minorities entails discussion of racism,…

To raise a child bilingually, parents may need assistance with increased second language input from outside the home. One way to do this is through the use of mother tongue playgroups for young children. (SL)

Suggests the use of principal components analysis as an alternative solution to the problem of grouping speakers by sociological characteristics prior to quantitative analysis. An example is presented of its application to vowel variation data collected as part of a sociolinguistic survey of English in Sydney, Australia. (Author/CB)

Provides a linguistically valid definition of minority language, as well as language expansion, contraction, and death. The definitional model presented features the establishment of a continuum which also is shown to have predictive power, yielding an effective operational definition of majority/minority status and predicting new data. (Author/CB)

Discussion of languages in Australia looks at the multicultural makeup of the society, the role of English, dynamics of language contact situations (community language change, intergenerational language shift, other factors in maintenance and shift), societal and individual multilingualism, and support for multilingualism (language policies,…

Reviews demographic and linguistic consequences of recent processes of migration and minority group influx in Western Europe and describes the case of the Netherlands to illustrate these effects. Highlights first- and second-language studies of immigrant and ethnic minority groups and notes resulting major demographic trends in Dutch society and…

Reviews recent research in multilingualism in Southern Africa, focusing on the role of languages in education, sociolinguistics, and language policy. Much of the research is on South Africa. Topics discussed include language of instruction in schools, teacher education, higher education, adult literacy, language contact, gender and linguistic…

Israel is fertile ground for research in multilingualism. Revitalization of Hebrew resulted in a tendency for ideological and instrumentally-motivated monolingualism to replace earlier multilingual patterns, even in the context of pressure for language shift by Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, and other languages, and Hebrew's competition with English in…

Presents Catalan as a substantial culture and looks at the present social situation of the Catalan language. Topics addressed include legal provisions; the educational system; the influence of mass media and information technology, including computer technology and applied linguistics; the audiovisual field; second-language learning; and future…