An objective of the federal government's action plan for official languages is to double the number of high school graduates who have functional knowledge of the second official language. Yet without a clear definition of what constitutes bilingualism, or a consistent approach to assessing language proficiency, how will we know if that goal has…

In the Basque Country, Northern Spain, Basque (Euskera) and Spanish are official languages. In recent decades, Basque language revitalization and the efforts to make this an unmarked language (normalization) have co-existed with the rapid increase in immigration from outside the Basque region, and most recently from outside Spain. Given the…

Maltese, the national language of Malta, is, without doubt, the dominant language of most Maltese in most domains of language use in Malta. It however shares official status with English, which is also in regular use. Most Maltese can, in fact, be said to be bilingual to differing degrees. This article begins by providing some background…

Monolingual speakers of a national language continue to be the ideal figures on which national identities and senses of community are built. Yet this longstanding equation between nation and language is being contested by other ideologies. Alternatives are emerging from such disparate social locations as the European Union, now advocating for…

This study explores the implications of Canada's official bilingual status on young immigrant adults who are presently studying at the undergraduate level at university. More precisely, I examine how these young adults have experienced and judge French as a second official language (FSOL) learning in "English-dominant" regions of Canada.…

The Valencian Community is an area in Spain where Valencian, a variety of Catalan, is the co-official language along with Spanish. Differently from other bilingual areas in Spain, the unique historical circumstances that the Valencian Community underwent have led to the current linguistic and ideological conflict in the area. The historical…

The paper presents the core aims and objectives of the teaching materials developed within the IEREST (Intercultural Education Resources for Erasmus Students and their Teachers) project, and shows how the innovative approach adopted for these activities can be implemented in the classroom. The IEREST teaching modules are innovative in that the…

The formulation of a languages-in-education policy (LEP) in Ireland illustrates some challenges at the macro- and micro-levels. A clamour for policy has reverberated through language education institutions in Ireland within the last decade. This paper explores and discusses: (1) the trajectory of an LEP in Ireland from initial formulation to…

This article reports on the South African results of a study to identify and explain relationships between some major factors associated with successful reading at Grade 5. With 11 official languages, educational policy in South Africa advocates an additive bilingualism model, and students in Grades 1 to 3 are taught in their mother tongue.…

In their study of language ideology, Valdes, Gonzalez, Lopez Garcia, and Marquez (2003) found evidence of a pervasive monolingualist ideology or "discourse of monolingualism" in college-level Spanish departments. This discourse, which mirrors national language ideologies in the United States, is premised on notions of nationalism, linguistic…

The author of this chapter argues that the failure of Spanish language education policies in the United States to educate both Latinos and non-Latinos has to do with the clash between three positions--(a) the English language, characterized by U.S. educational authorities as the unique and powerful lingua franca; (b) the Spanish language, as…

In Norway there are two written Norwegian languages, Bokmâl and Nynorsk. Of these two written languages Bokmâl is being used by the majority of the people, and Bokmâl has the highest prestige in the society. This article is about the shift of written language from Nynorsk to Bokmâl among young people in a traditional Nynorsk district in the…

This paper derives from an ethnographically oriented study of the emergence of English in innovative disciplinary speech events at a French-German bilingual university in Switzerland. From the outside viewed as dissent from the university's brand bilingualism, the use of English as a lingua franca enabled the multilingual "agents of…

This article describes how 16 Mozambican languages--and counting--have been brought into primary education in Mozambique through a 2002 curriculum reform, and how they are faring in light of tensions between general aspirations for dominant languages and public demand for bilingual education. Bilingual education based on learners' home languages,…

What is the relationship between the awareness of linguistic prestige and the security or insecurity in the use of minoritised languages? Is formal linguistic insecurity (as initially described by Labov) the same as the speakers' perception of linguistic insecurity? Which are the variables related to the various types of linguistic insecurity in…