The article aims to provide a historical overview of language planning and policy in Russia and to establish and analyse the overarching approaches in status, acquisition, and corpus planning. The provided examples and analysis of various stages reinforce the argument that the development of language policy and planning was consistent with the…

This commentary foregrounds factors and tensions involved in intergenerational language socialization in Chinese-speaking communities and homes. Of particular interest is the manner in which younger generations in homes in which other Chinese dialects ("fangyans") are spoken almost invariably seem to be shifting to Mandarin, and some of…

This paper overviews some of the domains of application of micro-level language planning approaches to foster multilingual education. It examines the language planning of local agents and the contexts in which their work contributes to multilingual education, either to expand or limit educational possibilities. It identifies four broad contexts of…

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…

One of the dangers that we should be aware of when we study issues of language policy and planning is the fragmentary perspective by which they can be approached. Reality, by contrast, is interrelated and overlapping. This is why a complexity perspective stresses the importance of studying the contexts of phenomena, that is to say, their external…

Europe as a multilingual continent hosts three main types of languages: dominant languages, autochthonous minority languages, and new minority languages. From a policy standpoint, planning for speakers of these languages and their needs become a complex matter in which many actors with different interests are involved. Of the many issues which…

Existing research concludes that diglossia between languages is a barrier to minority language use in health, social care and criminal justice settings. In addition, it concludes that more fulsome service provision is the key for promoting greater minority language use in such settings. Using the case of Welsh speakers in Wales as an exemplar,…

Gaelic medium education (GME) was established in Scotland in 1985, with 24 students enrolled in that year [Bòrd na Gàidhlig. (n.d.). "Gaelic education." Retrieved May 20, 2013, from http://www.gaidhlig.org.uk/bord/en/our-work/education/index.php (Bòrd na Gàidhlig website)]. Since this time, growth within GME has been incremental, and in…

In the early 1990s, the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) enacted educational reform. It officially abandoned its English-only policy at elementary school level, in favour of community languages. In response, the Kairak community of East New Britain Province developed a vernacular literacy programme. This paper, based on original fieldwork…

This monograph discusses South Korea's language situation in a language policy and planning context. This monograph consists of four parts. Part 1 presents a genetic, typological and sociolinguistic description of South Korea's national language, and an overview of minority languages, including English as well as other languages, recently…

Although a voluminous amount of literature addresses language-in-education policy in Africa, one area in which the literature remains sparse is the role of minority languages in education. This article presents an overview of complex issues regarding the hegemony claims of different minority language groups in Zimbabwe. Given the relatively small…

The aim of this paper is to examine the increased potential for language change from the micro-level, given the new domains in which minority languages are present in the global era. Drawing on the theoretical notion of sociolinguistic scales this paper presents a comparative account of the changing positions of the Irish and Inari Sami languages.…

The aim of this monograph is to provide a detailed account of language policy and language planning in Cyprus. Using both historical and synchronic data and adopting a mixed-methods approach (archival research, ethnographic tools and insights from sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis), this study attempts to trace the origins and the…

Although multilingualism is the norm in Africa the degree of linguistic complexity varies from one specific national context to another. While some countries are highly multilingual, others have fairly few languages. Similarly, whereas in some countries a good number of languages enjoy majority status; in others, we have a myriad of primarily…

This paper analyzes the ideologies and practices of local languages as the medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy in a multilingual school in Nepal. Grounded on the notion of language policy as a locally situated social practice, this critical ethnographic study investigates challenges--both ideological and implementational--that local languages MOI…