This paper discusses data from a Dutch-medium secondary school in Brussels where almost all pupils speak a different language than Dutch at home. It illustrates that teachers' preference for maintaining the school's monolingual policy did not preclude their creation of haphazard or humorous multilingual interstices that temporarily alleviated the…

This paper analyses the policies proposed by three international organisations to eliminate the use of sexist language. This research compares the main guidelines and recommendations presented at supranational level by the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union to avoid the use of sexist language. It then evaluates the…

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) has expanded all around the continent following European Council guidelines, favored by competence studies that identified educational systems as a strong determinant for second language gains and deficits. Over the years since the turn of the century, CLIL has gained the support of language policy…

Dual language immersion program models represent a potentially effective way to serve growing numbers of English language learners (ELLs) in schools and districts. However, local challenges, such as interpersonal conflict, can impact the process of implementing dual language policies and programs, limiting the extent to which they are able to meet…

In this article we proffer a theoretical model for analyzing power in language policy processes and incorporate ethnographic data to illustrate the usefulness of the model. Grounded in an ethnographic project in the US state of Washington, we examine how nominally identical school district-level programs, which are funded under the same…

This article examines the politics of policies promoting multilingualism in the European Union (EU), specifically in light of the recently released European Union Civil Society Platform on Multilingualism. As the most far-reaching and ambitious policy document issued by the European Commission, the Platform warrants close scrutiny at a significant…

This research explores the development of landmark federal language policy in the United States: the Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992 (NALA). Overturning more than two centuries of United States American Indian policy, NALA established the federal role in preserving and protecting Native American languages. Indigenous languages in the…

Sign Language Peoples (SLPs) across the world have developed their own languages and visuo-gestural-tactile cultures embodying their collective sense of Deafhood (Ladd 2003). Despite this, most nation-states treat their respective SLPs as disabled individuals, favoring disability benefits, cochlear implants, and mainstream education over language…

This paper seeks to address the ways in which ideology and literacy practices shape the responses of students to an ongoing initiative at the University of the Western Cape aimed at diversifying options for epistemological access, specifically the language varieties and the modes in which parts of the curriculum for a third year linguistics module…

A cross-national comparative study in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Madrid, Spain examines educational policies and practices that target immigrant students for whom the language variety normally spoken in the host country represents a second dialect. Policy contexts and schooling environments of the two urban centres were analyzed to gain deeper…

This paper explores language policy and planning from the perspectives of global ideologies, national agendas, and local transformation in two Asian countries, Vietnam and Nepal. Through engaged ethnography, we not only unravel complex ideological contestations of neoliberal and nationalistic agendas, but also portray language policy resistance…

This paper uses Language Management Theory (Nekvapil and Sherman, "Language management in contact situations. Perspectives from three continents". Peter Lang, Frankfurt/Main, 2009) to investigate Facebook pages as a site and instrument of behavior-toward-language, focusing specifically on the use of humor. The language in question is…

In this paper, it is argued that the existing conceptual framework of "language policy" should be expanded to include perspectives from the emerging field of "language governance", as the latter pays attention to the multi-faceted internal and external contexts in which institutions and organisations seek to develop language…

This 5-month ethnographic comparative case study of two culturally and linguistically diverse U.S. elementary classrooms juxtaposes restrictive educational language policies with the theoretical principles of culturally sustaining pedagogy to explore a gap in our understanding of how teachers reflect educational language policies in the range of…

The notion in popular linguistic discourse that French suffers from a narrow and prescriptive tradition of language policing, with the "Academie Francaise" (AF) as the central player, is frequently contrasted with an image of English as a democratic, borrowing language, better suited to its global role. This misrepresents the role of the AF in the…