This paper discusses contemporary societal roles of German in the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania). Speaker and learner statistics and a summary of sociolinguistic research (Linguistic Landscapes, language learning motivation, language policies, international roles of languages) suggest that German has by far fewer speakers and functions…

Despite Estonia being ranked among the highest performing nations in the world-wide testing of students, these encouraging results are somewhat overshadowed by the challenge to overcome the divided school system with different languages of learning that impacts crucially on students' social, academic and professional paths. The study examines…

The term 'new speaker' has recently emerged as an attempt by sociolinguists not only to understand the different types of speaker profiles that can be found in contemporary societies, but also to grasp the underlying processes of becoming a legitimate speaker in a given society. In this article, we combine the results from two studies situated in…

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…