Latin American countries have experienced demographic and linguistic changes since Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (EIB) was first developed. Yet, ministries of education continue to impose generic models that do not reflect the realities of migrant Indigenous groups, who experience linguistic and ethnic minoritisation processes. Based on our…

This paper uses the themes of language rights, language choice, and language risk to consider linguistic insecurity in the Northwest Amazon (Upper Negro river) region of Brazil. Because the region is home to a large number of languages (c. two dozen), the idea of preserving this diversity is a popular theme in discourses about language in the…

In this paper we provide a critical account of selected key linguistic and cultural revitalisation experiences in Mexico. For this aim, the project entitled Proyecto de Revitalización, Mantenimiento y Desarrollo Lingüístico y Cultural (Linguistic and Cultural Revitalisation, Maintenance and Development Project), which has been developed for over…

This article offers a critical appraisal of "educación intercultural bilingüe," an educational model with at least five decades of implementation. When this term was coined, Indigenous populations were mostly monolingual and their settlements mostly rural and distant from the seats of cultural hegemony and power. The situation is now…

Mapoyo, a Carib language of Venezuela with only one native language speaker, is very close to becoming dormant. Recent interest in the revitalisation of the language has led to classes being imparted in the elementary school and to teachers trying to learn the language and to reinforce it in the school. However, in 2013 when there were 3 speakers…

In this essay we examine the notions of language contact phenomena such as borrowing, codeswitching, codemixing, codemeshing, and translanguaging. We also explore the concepts of translingualism and translingual literacies. We discuss how the notions of bilingualism and multilingualism are differentiated from translingualism and translingual…

Recent studies have examined Indigenous and mestizo communities that engage in social practices of transculturated, Amerindian and translingual literacies, often to resist efforts by powerful groups to oppress them. By drawing on data from studies conducted in Peru and the United States, we trace the trajectories of Amerindian and translingual…

We draw on Rampton's "Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents" (2014. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge) notion of "crossing" to explore contestations in ethnolinguistic, cultural and racial affiliations at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), a university built for "Coloureds" in apartheid South Africa, but…

In light of a major study on educational outcomes, this paper explores how Aboriginal language dominance and virtually exclusive use of oral communications in one Aboriginal group has been affected by its interaction with Western institutions. For several years negotiations have been undertaken among the Innu Nation of Labrador, the province of…