Stories and storytelling about language initiatives are an important political device in constructing and perpetuating language status planning and policies. However, little attention has been given to meta-discursive practices by institutions about Indigenous language revitalization in the U.S. as well as how music can play important roles in…

Latin American countries have experienced demographic and linguistic changes since Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (EIB) was first developed. Yet, ministries of education continue to impose generic models that do not reflect the realities of migrant Indigenous groups, who experience linguistic and ethnic minoritisation processes. Based on our…

This paper uses the themes of language rights, language choice, and language risk to consider linguistic insecurity in the Northwest Amazon (Upper Negro river) region of Brazil. Because the region is home to a large number of languages (c. two dozen), the idea of preserving this diversity is a popular theme in discourses about language in the…

Indigenous communities worldwide face threats to their linguistic and epistemic heritage with the unabated spread of dominant colonial languages and global monocultures, such as English and the neoliberal, imperialistic worldview. There is considerable strain on the relatively few Elders and speakers of Indigenous languages to maintain cultures…

In this paper we provide a critical account of selected key linguistic and cultural revitalisation experiences in Mexico. For this aim, the project entitled Proyecto de Revitalización, Mantenimiento y Desarrollo Lingüístico y Cultural (Linguistic and Cultural Revitalisation, Maintenance and Development Project), which has been developed for over…

This article traces the various ways that 'languages at risk' in the Yukon Territory, Canada, are imagined and managed across a range of 'stakeholders.' Predicated on a history of oppression and the management of risk in the U.S. and Canada, aboriginal language endangerment has arisen from insecurities about communicative diversity. Conversely…

This article offers a critical appraisal of "educación intercultural bilingüe," an educational model with at least five decades of implementation. When this term was coined, Indigenous populations were mostly monolingual and their settlements mostly rural and distant from the seats of cultural hegemony and power. The situation is now…

The Indian Constitution and the Directive Principles for State Policy (DPSP) aspire that individual states with Indigenous Tribal Minority (ITM) populations take special care to promote education and economic interests of the ITM communities. Despite Art 350(a) which explicitly guarantees (only) the ITM child education in its mother-tongue, the…

The Italian linguistic space has radically changed through the onset of the new millennium due to the presence of innovative multiple linguistic practices that have taken place as a consequence of deterritorialization processes. Furthermore, Latino diaspora in recent years have fostered the appearance of new forms of Global Spanishes (García and…

The younger generations are considered one of the principal agents in the maintenance or shift of any language. In the cycle of the language maintenance, children learn their mother tongue, and pass it on to the future generations. The cycle is broken when they no longer speak the mother tongue. The language choices they make are particularly…

Mapoyo, a Carib language of Venezuela with only one native language speaker, is very close to becoming dormant. Recent interest in the revitalisation of the language has led to classes being imparted in the elementary school and to teachers trying to learn the language and to reinforce it in the school. However, in 2013 when there were 3 speakers…

The Shiwiar are an indigenous nation of Ecuador and Peru, and they are one of five ethnic groups collectively known as the Jivaroan people. In stark contrast to the other Jivaroan groups, the Shiwiar have largely been overlooked by local governments until recently and are still popularly considered to be an offshoot of their closely related…

In this essay we examine the notions of language contact phenomena such as borrowing, codeswitching, codemixing, codemeshing, and translanguaging. We also explore the concepts of translingualism and translingual literacies. We discuss how the notions of bilingualism and multilingualism are differentiated from translingualism and translingual…

Listeners can access information about a speaker such as age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background upon hearing their speech. However, it is still not clear if listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual (matched-guise) test is used to measure whether listeners' accentedness…

Indigenous languages of Mexico have largely been excluded from formal education spaces. This ethnographic action research study highlights a context where "Diidxazá"/ Isthmus Zapotec, an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, has recently begun to be taught in higher education. We examine the ways that administrators, the teacher, and students…