In the British region of Cornwall, state intervention in long-standing practices of the translation of music lyrics for song competitions has created major shifts, including remarkable competitive successes. Proponents of the Kernewek (Cornish) Language have long used translated musical lyrics as a tool for language revival, especially in annual…

This paper engages with the negotiation of insider and outsider researcher identities in the context of Welsh-English bilingualism in Wales. It aims to develop a reflexive approach to researching bilingualism, foregrounding the actions and experiences of doing bilingual research in a minority language context. Taking data from education and…

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…

Situated within research and practice on intercultural communication education, this paper suggests an urgent inclusion of dialogism and ethics in the ways it is dealt with around the world. Supranational institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Council of Europe, treat intercultural…

This article examines how Russian speakers in Ireland delimit and describe (their/the) Russian language in relation to representations of standard Russian. It is based on analysis of discussions conducted between speakers of Russian living in Ireland, facilitated by the Our Languages (2008-2011) research project, investigating multilingualism and…

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…

The present contribution focuses on the Galician-descendant community in the city of Buenos Aires. Its aim is to draw attention on the academic interest of research on the processes of assimilation to the language and identity of reception (in that case, Spanish) and maintenance or recovery of the language and identity of origin in the case of a…

This article explores the implications of John Rawls' political liberalism for linguistic diversity and language policy, by focusing on the following question: what kind(s) of equality between speakers of different languages and with different linguistic identities should the state guarantee under political liberalism? The article makes three…

This contribution examines the linguistic perceptions and ideologies of an individual of Latin American origin, Jorge, based in the German-speaking region of Switzerland, through narratives to analyse how pre-existing normative linguistic discourses influence (linguistic) identities. Connecting the micro-level of Jorge's narrative to the macro…

This paper will consider language management from the perspective of efficiency, and will set the grounds for a new approach to linguistic justice: a market failure approach. The principle of efficiency emphasises the need to satisfy individuals' preferences in an optimal way. Applying this principle with regard to language would justify language…

Recent years have seen a growing interest in language among political philosophers. While being, on the whole, a positive development, the considerable focus of this literature on the issue of linguistic justice paradoxically limits the breadth and depth of that emerging inquiry, by reducing the conceptual vocabulary intrinsic to the much broader…

There have been widespread concerns over the decline of modern languages and waning interest in learning languages other than English (LOTEs) around the world, thought to be partly due to recent political events including Brexit and Trump's aggressive isolationism in the United States. By contrast, governments in Greater China have energetically…

Many contributors to the normative literature on language policy argue that inclusive multilingual regimes are beneficial on several grounds. However, despite the professed advantages of multilingualism, most nation-states have been reluctant to equally recognise minority languages alongside the majority language. This reality raises three…

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…

Almost a century after the end of the period of Japanese immigration to Hawaii plantations, the Japanese language is no longer the main medium of communication among local Japanese in Hawaii. Today, use of the Japanese language and associated traditional images are often used symbolically rather than literally to convey their meanings, and this is…