Understanding the multilingual language context of deaf children's lives provides an essential knowledge base from which to develop the early support of children and families. Current models of early support tend to draw on Euro-Western understandings of the multilingual lives of families of deaf children and assume an established infrastructure…

This paper explores the complexities behind the educational decisions of Tibetan parents on sending their children to the interior cities for dislocated secondary education. Drawing on qualitative data through multiple methods, we find that their educational decisions are driven both by a rational calculation of the benefits and costs and by a…

In this article we discuss the practice and politics of translanguaging in the context of deaf signers. Applying the translanguaging concept to deaf signers brings a different perspective by focusing on sensorial accessibility. While the sensory orientations of deaf people are at the heart of their translanguaging practices, sensory asymmetries…

Since 2015, China has established a 'Group Form of Educational Aid for Tibet' programme to dispatch ethnic Han majority teachers from inland cities to teach in Tibetan schools for a short period of time. Through the programme, the state aims to offer the gift of educational development to this highland area with a concentrated Tibetan minority…

How migrants, refugees and minority groups acquire a sense of belonging in their adopted society is a concern for nations worldwide as they aim to balance the diversity and inclusion of growing numbers of migrants with ensuring harmony and cohesion across society. In postcolonial Hong Kong, the population diversity is accompanied with a swift…

This article analyses how two official languages of Belarus, Russian and Belarusian, are represented on the homepages of two national news websites through the analysis of media discourse within headlines and leads of news stories, and focusing on aspects of multimodality of websites. In view of the equal legal status of these languages, this…

Global discourses around English-medium instruction (EMI) have inspired controversy for many years now. A wide range of scholars has espoused multiple opinions exhorting the benefits and disadvantages of using English as a medium of instruction in higher education. Although EMI is certainly relevant to primary and secondary school education, this…

Many contributors to the normative literature on language policy argue that inclusive multilingual regimes are beneficial on several grounds. However, despite the professed advantages of multilingualism, most nation-states have been reluctant to equally recognise minority languages alongside the majority language. This reality raises three…

This paper analyses the controversial discourses around the significance of the Arabic language in Eritrea. It challenges the arguments of the government and some scholars, who claim that the Arabic language is alien to Eritrean society. They argue that it was introduced as an official language under British rule and is only spoken by the Rashaida…

While current conceptualisations of the inextricable connection between language and culture in English language education are largely informed by complex sociocultural theories that view culture as constructed in and through social practices among people, classroom practices continue to be influenced by mainstream discourses of culture that…

This article presents a case study of the former Yugoslavia, focusing on the role of language in constructing collective identities and establishing ethnic boundaries in relation to political borders. After looking at the variable and frequently multiple language-identity links in the South Slavic world, it examines the part that Serbo-Croatian,…

The need to recognise English language teaching (ELT) as a site for the interplay of cultural politics and competing discourses has been acknowledged in ELT literature. Writing as an English teacher in Japan, and not unfamiliar over the years with the confluencing of discourses whether relating to neoliberalism, globalisation or other forces…

Few studies have addressed the question how the two main linguistic groups in Belgium (French and Flemish speakers) code each other. The research reported in this article is based on a storytelling forum of 56 persons that gathered five times. The storytelling sessions yielded 91 different stories about living in a bilingual society. These were…

The Charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was officially adopted in February 2009. Article 34 of the Charter states that, "The working language of ASEAN shall be English". In this article, I first briefly trace the development of English in ASEAN and demonstrate that, even in those countries of the ASEAN group…

Linguistics is implicated in the colonial project of the invention of "self-contained" "racial" and "tribal units" in the Sudan. This paper has two objectives. First, to historicise the notions of "language" in the postcolonial discourse of language planning in the Sudan by reviewing one of the significant…