In the past century, French has shifted from being the native language of many Louisianans to being an endangered dialect. Since the creation of the state agency CODOFIL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) in the 1960's, efforts have been made to revitalize French in Louisiana, and since the 1980's, some parishes have offered…

This paper advocates a new perspective on languages. It begins by demonstrating that, the occasional disavowals of sociolinguists notwithstanding, the lens through which we in the 21st century, both specialists and laypeople, view languages is predominantly biological. It then suggests that this biological metaphor is conceptually unhelpful and…

This article is based on long-term participant observation and interviews with pupils and graduates of the Diwan immersion high school in Brittany, France. With reference to the theory of "communities of practice," this article shows how the education in the Breton immersion school can influence a knowledge of the minority language and…

This paper, after shortly introducing "Folk Linguistics" by defining its domain of competence [cf. Preston, Dennis R., ed. 1999. "Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology." Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Niedzielski, Nancy A., and Dennis R. Preston. 2003. "Folk Linguistics." Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter], attempts to draw an…

This article presents a case study of the perceptions of Spanish heritage speakers enrolled in introductory-level Spanish foreign language courses. Despite their own identities that were linked to the United States and Spanish of the Borderlands, the participants felt that the curriculum acknowledged the Spanish of Spain and foreign countries but…

The academic and public debates about language maintenance and language shift in the post-1994 South Africa distract attention from the more productive and important endeavour of explaining the nature of the multilingualism observed among users of African languages in urban contexts. An explanation for this phenomenon is offered here, based on…

The topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language-policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance [Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance in a Corsican School: Institutional and…

The socio-cultural conditions of late modernity induce a "reflexive imperative" amongst young people, which also results in metapragmatic and metalinguistic behaviour, as has been demonstrated by linguistic ethnographers (LE). However, recent LE studies on reflexivity in Western European settings have mainly focused on how groups of…

Effective usage of nonverbal and verbal communication in Japanese such as gestures, mimics, silence and employing grammatical or lexical honorifics plays a significant role in determining the success of foreign language learners in obtaining their intended employment. This study examines the second language (L2) learning of politeness and social…

Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers' agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic…

Language policies have a better chance of succeeding if they align with the persuasions of the polity, and this is only more pronounced in the case of endangered languages, such as Te Reo (the Maori language) in New Zealand. There, a comprehensive suite of laws, policies, and programmes are in place to acknowledge and reverse the linguistic…

The development of the Berlin urban vernacular during the late Early Modern and Industrial Period has been described in the literature in two primary ways: The first describes it as the result of the wholesale adoption of an autochthonous Upper Saxon dialect by a small and mobile urban elite in Berlin, who in turn imparted this newly-acquired…

Institutions of higher education (HEIs) in English-speaking countries have been engaged in internationalization for decades. Among the many factors driving their internationalization are commitments to increasing and celebrating diversity as well as a desire to foster cross-cultural cooperation. Nonetheless, the linguistic diversity of their…

Drawing on linguistic anthropological notions of language ideologies and sociolinguistic approaches to stance, this study examines the meaning-making resources through which Spanish heritage language (HL) learners orient toward ideological perspectives on language value and linguistic expertise in classroom interaction. Part of a larger…

The aim of this chapter is to point to the complexities of the English language in Israel from a critical perspective, its global language status, and the manners in which it affects and interacts with a variety of local issues. The main focus is on how the presence of a global language, like English, affects a given sociolinguistic reality,…