International mobility has caused a need for language education where adults can learn the language(s) used in their new country. In Sweden, the language programme SFI (Swedish for immigrants) provides basic second language education for adult immigrants. For those learners who are not yet functionally literate, basic literacy education is…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…

The authors investigate the sociolinguistic dynamics in multilingual families from the point of view of speakers' linguistic trajectories, ideologies, and repertoires. Drawing on interview data from intermarried couples of different generational and linguistic profiles of two families in Sweden, the authors examine how speakers' lived experience…

This study sought to explore the ideological and implementational spaces for mainstreaming multilingual pedagogies (MPs) in initial teacher education (ITE) policies and curricula across the European Union. The concept of linguistically sensitive teaching (LST) was used as a lens to examine inclusive, equity-centred MPs in ITE. A multi-sited…

In the wake of the enactment of Sweden's Language Act in 2009 and in the face of the growing presence of English, Swedish universities have been called upon by the Swedish Higher Education Authority to craft their own language policy documents. This study focuses on the discursive negotiation of institutional bilingualism by a language policy…

Teachers have an agentive role as they interpret, evaluate and develop language policies and practices. In the current study we interviewed a bilingual pre-school teacher in Finland during the first year of implementing a new way of working bilingually with a class of monolingual children. Applying nexus analysis, we explored the teacher…

This article makes a case for studying the perceptions that young people have of the ways of speaking of both themselves and others on the supposition that constructions of ambient sociolinguistic variation have an impact on the language development and use of individual language users. Such a study is particularly relevant in multilingual…

Examines three Nordic bilingual programs: (1) immersion, where majority children with a high status mother tongue learn a second language; (2) submersion, where minority children with a low status mother tongue are forced to learn the majority language; and (3) language shelter, where minority children learn the majority language as a second…

The longitudinal pilot study described here shows that immigrant children, trained prior to school entry and untrained, have great difficulties in language, though the groups are better able to cope. Results suggest some support for the assumption about the importance of the first language in the acquisition of the second. (Author/HP)

Semilingualism is discussed as a sociolinguistic concept and is viewed as a mediating variable when the society reproduces the class structure and vocational structure of suppressed minorities. A Finnish group of immigrant children in Sweden is the minority considered. It was found that the longer the Finnish children were educated in Finnish, the…

This book focuses on the minority languages of Europe, those other than the national languages of European Union member states, by looking at the demographic, sociolinguistic, and educational aspects of both regional and immigrant languages. Empirical evidence for the status of these other languages of multicultural Europe is brought together in a…

About 2,200 immigrant children in Sweden were studied by means of tests and teacher questionnaires. The children, representing 36 nationalities, were born outside Sweden and were distributed over the nine grades of the Swedish Comprehensive School. Various functional language skills in Swedish as a second language (L2), nonverbal intelligence and…

The two volumes of these working papers include articles by linguists from Scandinavia and other parts of the world. Under the heading, "The Use of IT in Grammatical Analysis/Parsing" are five articles: "Creating Inflecting Electronic Thesauri"; "Tagging Speech Data--Constraint Grammar Analysis of Spoken Portuguese";…