This paper explores the experience and impact of participation in afterschool oral improvisation workshops -- bertso workshops -- for young Basque speakers. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews among young people in the Northern Basque Country, the researcher, a practicing improviser, bertsolari, herself, argues that the…

Building on the emerging notion of "normative language policy", this article seeks to contribute to the further development of an integrated framework for researching the ethics of language policy and planning. Using the case of minority language rights in France as an example, it demonstrates the benefit of combining context-sensitive…

Discourses which seek to position different speakers/users of Breton through the use of labels such as 'traditional', 'new', 'learner', 'néo-bretonnant', 'brittophone', etc. draw on persistent essentialist ideologies of language and create, in the process, contested elites and counter-elites in Breton-speaking networks. These discourses can be…

This article explores the carefully managed semiotic complex found in the Corsican village of Pigna with respect to the themes of pride and profit in the valuation of minority languages. This complex includes the careful coordination of color, graphics, the use of the Corsican language, as well as high-tech soundscaping of place through QR codes…

Through a comparison of France and Germany, this article investigates why the overall conception of multilingualism promoted by the education systems of the two countries favours the teaching of "useful" European standard languages over that of minority and migrant languages that are conceived in merely cultural terms. Adopting a…

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Toronto, Ontario, this article examines the schooling behaviour of parents who have migrated from France to Canada. The population under study, engaged in a "northern" kind of migration, generally benefits from an education acquired in the pre-migration period and from the legitimacy of…

Globalisation processes, often accused of imposing uniformity the world over, also open up opportunities for minorities (including linguistic ones) to exploit a variety of spaces for self-definition and self-expression. The expansion in the use of minority languages in public signage is one consequence of this present phase of reorientation in…

This contribution documents the strategies bi/plurilingual children spontaneously develop when confronted with a task that demands comprehension of texts in a third language. To illustrate these strategies in context, the paper draws from classroom interaction excerpts: small groups of children (ages 8-10) discover meaning in a text in a language…