The linguistic landscape (LL) is a sociolinguistic concept that captures power relations and identity marking in the linguistic rendering of urban space: the city read as text. As such, LL is embedded in the physical geography of the cityscape. However, with the increasing scope of multilingual capabilities in digital communications, multilingual…

This paper deals with cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in early trilingualism involving the languages German, English and Farsi. The data come from the case study of the author's two children growing up in a trilingual family within a monolingual German-speaking environment. Specific types of CLI from the non-dominant language Farsi on German and…

Nepali, the official language of administration of Nepal, has been privileged through systematic political manoeuvres throughout its history. English also enjoys special status and privileges, and despite the fact that it is officially only a "foreign" language, in practice it is one of the most dominant languages in educational and…

In this discussion of a set of studies that fits the trope of "Indian Languages in Unexpected Places," I explore the obvious necessity of developing a relevant notion of linguistic "leakage" following a famous image from the writings of the linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir. Though in its original use, the concept applied more to the order of…

During the past two decades, field linguists have expressed serious concerns over the unprecedented rapid loss of "indigenous languages", the endangerment of many others, and the implications of these processes for the education and economic development of "indigenous populations", among other matters. The book to which this article responds is a…

This paper highlights the fact that language endangerment in some multilingual developing societies is causal to the violent ethnic conflicts in those societies. Endangered language identity groups shift to the dominant language groups. But, over time, a concatenation of factors and nuanced realisation of perceived marginalisation (showing overtly…

This article draws on a survey of 64 self-identified multilingual faculty from across the disciplines who currently teach with writing in English at the undergraduate and graduate level. The survey asked faculty about their linguistic experiences from childhood through the present and thus offers insights about the complexity of multilingual…

The present study investigates the link between multilingualism/multiculturalism, acculturation and the personality profile (as measured by the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire) of 79 young London teenagers, half of whom were born abroad and had settled down in London during their childhood "Third Culture Kids" (TCKs; Pollock…

This study explores the language policy and practice of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), an African regional economic organisation made up of 14 member states (Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia…

This paper examines how the interconnected aspects of the stance triangle (Du Bois 2007) allow speakers to tap into multiple ideological layers as they take a stance and reveal intra-ethnic group tensions. Using a detailed interaction analysis of a Chinese American family's multilingual interaction, the paper explores how such ideological dynamics…

Throughout the 20th century, international communication has shifted from a plural use of several languages to a clear pre-eminence of English, especially in the field of science. This paper focuses on international periodical publications where more than 75 percent of the articles in the social sciences and humanities and well over 90 percent in…

This paper describes multiple Estonian-Russian language contacts in Estonia. For synchronic microsociolinguistic research it is usual to concentrate on the impact of a sociolinguistically dominant language A on an immigrant/minority language B. In the Soviet setting, the dominant language was usually Russian (despite Russians being a minority).…

The focus of this paper is on speakers' rationalisations of their everyday linguistic choices as members of a multilingual academic department in the US. Given the monolingual macro-context, the myriad of native languages spoken by participants, and the professional stake in language competence, the question of how speakers arrive at language…

Claims that the mother tongue function in foreign language learning over a background of two or more languages is transferable to any one of the background languages and that this transfer is predictable by a set of principles. Presents applications of the principles to multilingual settings of Nigeria and Cameroon. (SED)

Discusses the factors to consider when choosing which language or dialect to use in multilingual or multidialectal societies for literature and educational programs. Comprehension is the primary factor to consider but negative attitudes towards one's own language or a second language may hinder the acceptance of literature. (SED)