Drawing on the ethico-political framework of hospitality, this paper investigates the communicative practices of three administrative support staff as they attempt to manage the twin challenges of working in adherence to state and institutional language policies while communicating ethically in an internationalising workplace. Academic…

This article makes the case for conducting ethnographic research of a multi-scalar nature that links language policy processes and ideologies of language with everyday practices, on the ground, in local schools and classrooms. As with other researchers engaged in the ethnography of language policy (e.g. McCarty, 2011; Johnson, 2013), my concern is…

This article analyses the construction of linguistic value and recognition of linguistic resources in educational spaces in Finland, where Swedish is the second national language and in Sweden, where Finnish is one of five official minority languages. Drawing on ethnographic methods, critically informed notions of language policy and spatial…

Language policy and Linguistic Landscapes (LL) are a highly contested area in South Africa. Due to Apartheid, the education system constitutes the core of such contestation. In Post-Apartheid South Africa the new Constitution of 1996, the South African Schools Act (SASA) and recent political initiatives such as the Use of Official Languages Act of…

In recent years there has been a focus in language policy research on understanding how national policies are interpreted and negotiated by social actors on the ground. This paper looks at the interplay between government and grassroots initiatives to create Galician-speaking spaces in predominantly Spanish-speaking urban settings. While official…

This article explores India's linguistic diversity from a language policy perspective, emphasizing policies relevant to linguistic minorities. The Kumaun region of Utterakhand provides a local, minority-language perspective on national-level language planning. A look at the complexity of counting India's languages reveals language planning…

In this study we argue that a focus on language learning ecologies, that is, situations for participation in various communicative practices, can shed light on the intricate processes through which minority children develop or are constrained from acquiring cultural and linguistic competencies (here, of a majority language). The analysis draws on…

The current study examines bilingual children as language policy agents in the interplay between official language policy and education policy at three Swedish-medium preschools in Finland. For this purpose we monitored nine Finnish-Swedish bilingual children aged 3 to 5 years for 18 months. The preschools were located in three different parts of…

This article reveals how center-periphery relations have unfolded, over time, in language policy processes in one nation--Timor-Leste--on the global periphery. We take a "longue durée" perspective on the language policy processes at work in this historical context, showing how different regimes of language were imposed, in the past, by…

This paper studies the relationship between language attitudes and the involvement of Sabaot stakeholders in the implementation of the Kenyan language-in-education policy (mother tongue [MT] as subject). Attitudes were vitally important for how the policy was interpreted, the extent to which stakeholders invested their time and the way in which…