Language revitalization is imbued with tensions, and while it often is emancipatory, reclaiming a language can be a painful, silencing experience. Processes of colonization have led to epistemological absences (Santos 2012), which may be conceptualized as manifestations of silence. Understanding how and why silences come about and linger today is…

This study demonstrates that linguistic landscape analysis is a powerful tool for assessing the effectiveness of a university language policy, as it provides "in situ" evidence for discursive patterns shaping language use in public space. It uses the official language policy of a Norwegian institution of higher education (Høgskulen på…

This article examines multilingual language use in two groups of children, one group at a state school, and one at a private IB school. The IB school has earlier been assumed to reflect an 'elite' multilingualism. Three research questions are posed: to what extent is the children's language use multilingual, what are their typological profiles,…

This article critically examines the discourses concerning historical and transnational linguistic and cultural diversity in the semiotic landscape of a new teacher education building in Norway. In 2020, this building, housing the Department of Education, opened at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, in the city of Tromsø. Designing,…

This article explores playfulness and creativity in translingual family interactions. In particular, it focuses on how and to what ends adolescents mobilize multilingual resources in family interactions. It investigates the cases of two multilingual families with adolescent children (13-18 years old). The families have different linguistic…

This article investigates the multilingual experiences of three Norwegian and Spanish-speaking adolescents with transnational backgrounds. Drawing on narrative analysis and positioning theory, the article seeks to understand how the adolescents position themselves in relation to different expectations of linguistic competence, identities, and…

Multilingual families and their language policies have attracted considerable attention in recent sociolinguistic work. Adding to this line of research, this article focuses on a case study of a transnational Polish family living in Norway and investigates the role adolescent children may play in the formation of family language policies. To this…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…

This paper contributes to current sociolinguistic research on the rapidly-changing landscape of digitally mediated communication (Androutsopoulos and Staehr 2018) by presenting mediagrams, a new method for research on transnational mediated interaction. Based on an ethnographic study of mediated multilingual communication in four families with…

Non-linguists' perceptions of language in use are generally considered to be strongly influenced by evaluative factors: attitudes, values and ideology. Such a perspective represents a somewhat biased approach to ordinary people's knowledge about language, which is characteristic of both sociolinguistics and its sub-branch, perceptual dialectology.…

This study applies perspectives from sociolinguistics to investigate the language mixing of a bilingual two year old acquiring Norwegian and English simultaneously in Norway. The investigation stresses the need to examine more carefully the roles of dominance and context in the language mixing of young bilingual children. (40 references) (JL)

In a Norwegian study of fifth grade linguistic minority (LM) children's comprehension of the language of instruction, it was found that some LM children still have serious comprehension problems in spite of being born and schooled in Norway. Teachers correctly expected the LM children to comprehend less than their Norwegian classmates. (33…