In recent decades, language revitalisation policies, programmes and initiatives have had to develop in an environment of major social, political, economic, or technological changes that have had an extraordinary impact on the governance of minority language revitalisation. In this context, we have studied the changes that have taken place in the…

This article investigates to what extent the European Union (EU) has the means to protect minority and regional languages in the EU, looking at the ways three different bodies of the EU, the European Parliament (EP), the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) differ in handling language…

This paper provides a broad comparative summary of all the cases addressed in the Special Issue "Hot and cold ethnicities in post-Soviet space." The aim of the summary is to pinpoint the major features that have an impact on the ethnic temperatures in the social settings studied. This paper argues that ethnic, national, civic and…

The paper considers whether bilingualism has an economic value in Slovenia's two ethnically mixed regions, or whether its value is more related to identity, and restricted primarily to the personal, educational and cultural spheres. Specifically, it asks whether bilingualism is rewarded on the labour market and what local people think about this…

This paper explores the identity and the social/political behaviour of Russians in post-Soviet Central Asia through a comparison with the Baltic countries via a "hot and cold ethnicity" paradigm. Central Asian Russians are more likely, ceteris paribus, to be found at the "cold" end of the spectrum of "ethnic…

The end of the cold war prompted most of the former Soviet republics to face ethnic issues that had remained latent or intangible for decades. Whilst some ethnic groups were actively campaigning for their rights, some others seemed uninterested in being represented politically. The recent theory of hot and cold ethnicity has been conceived to…