As China is building closer economic and geopolitical relations with oil-rich Arabian Gulf Cooperation Council countries, enthusiasm for learning and teaching Chinese is surging in the region. In Kuwait, whereas Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) education is emerging, research into this topical domain remains scarce, particularly on issues such…

Over the past two decades, the Chinese language has emerged as a global language. Gulf Cooperation Council countries, such as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, have integrated Chinese language into their educational systems and established Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese language and culture. In Qatar, interest in…

Informed by translingual practice [Canagarajah, S. 2013a. "Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations." New York: Routledge] and poststructuralist conceptualisation of identity [Norton, B. 2000. "Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change." "TESOL Quarterly" 35…

This paper explores linguistic landscapes and the enactment of public visibility and presence of non-majority linguistic groups in EU member states. Non-majority linguistic groups gain power, visibility and presence through the introduction of bilingual or multilingual signposts on roads, streets, squares, and public buildings in towns and cities…

Multicultural European societies increasingly demand internationally oriented citizens, who are willing to actively participate in civic life and able to successfully access the labour market. The European dimension in education supposedly endows youngsters with civic values, multiculturalist attitudes and plurilingual competences which ultimately…

Our paper discusses trends and challenges faced by Lithuanian Higher Education (HE) internationalisation policy processes in the context of European and global internationalisation tendencies. Using 2001-2011 EU mobility statistics and data from recent HE Lithuanian strategic programmes aimed at promoting the internationalisation of university…

Although development goals are usually set as targets that must be achieved in a development process, experience with development goals in Africa has tended to underscore underperformance either in terms of a shortfall in the targets attained or in terms of inadequate pursuit of specific goals. To illustrate this syndrome, the African Union's New…

This paper discusses language usage patterns amongst Eastern European migrants living in the East Anglia region of Great Britain. It examines the relationship between individual speakers' language use and societal factors, with an emphasis of respondents' perceptions of ethnic, cultural and linguistic vitality. A linguistic vitality and language…

French political leaders have voiced objections to prospective Turkish membership of the European Union (EU), citing material reasons as well as cultural objections involving the uncertain role of a predominantly Islamic society within a European political and economic bloc. Given the importance of the French language as a component of France's…

Based on recent theoretical insights into the conceptual role of metaphors, this paper investigates figurative discourse in the current conceptualisation of the European Union (EU) in Polish. The metaphorical expressions found in the data present a cline of conventionality, and many of them display processes analysed by Lakoff and Turner (1989),…

This paper describes the impact of European Union accession negotiations on language ideological debates regarding minority (language) and citizenship rights in the Baltic Republics. It explores issues pertaining to the transferability of standards developed for established democracies in the West to the situation of democratising countries in…

This paper examines the effect of the recent European Union (EU) enlargement on minority language policies in the Baltic states, and in particular in Latvia and Estonia. I first look at the so-called Copenhagen political criteria conditioning EU accession and at the European Commission's monitoring system for assessing applicant countries'…

The development of the Russian intelligentsia is closely related to discourses concerning Russia's position vis-a-vis Europe and the Western world, such as those of Slavophiles and Westernisers. This paper is about Russian authors and painters who are now becoming part of Europe, as the country in which they live, Estonia, has recently entered the…

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) has strengthened the position of English, a situation which has led some voices to warn against the hegemony of this language. Yet, very few studies have been undertaken in contexts where English is added to the presence of both a minority and a majority language. This is the case of the Basque Autonomous…