Aragonese is a threatened Romance language immersed in a historical process of substitution by Spanish, the official language. The number of speakers who maintained its transmission to younger generations, mainly in rural areas, has extremely declined over the last century. In the meantime, revitalisation efforts have incorporated new speakers,…

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…

The research presented here constitutes the first investigation of the standard language ideology (SLI) in Great Britain that takes account of a multiethnolect -- namely Multicultural London English (MLE). A corpus-informed discourse study was conducted to explore representations of MLE and its speakers in two corpora: one containing data from…

This article investigates what kind of multilingual operations are carried out as migrant and transnational creative writers deploy in their fictions in Italian (often an acquired language) the languages which they hold in their personal repertoires. Exploring first the linguistic, political and cultural implications of what Algerian author, Amara…

Standard language cultures are characterised by beliefs in idealised standard forms of the language in question. In this paper, these beliefs are connected to the concepts of referee design and speech community, through analysis of how Swedish adolescents reflect upon and self-assess their language proficiencies. The data consist of interviews…

This paper examines the ecology of Slovene in the twentieth century by focusing on two key emergent themes. It focuses firstly on monolingualism as a key goal for Slovene language planners, starting with their efforts to create a standard language with no German influences in the nineteenth century, and continuing in their work to prevent…

The role of linguists in Lithuanian society is quite different from that in western countries. It is still broadly assumed that they not only describe the language use and codify the norms of standard variety, but that they also possess the status of moral authorities having access to the mysteries of language. In the tradition of Lithuanian…

Although traditional, unitary models of language standardisation have been prominent in minority languages, it is contended that this approach reproduces dominant language hierarchies and hegemonies, diminishes linguistic diversity and marginalises speakers who do not conform to prestige models. The polynomic model has been described as an…

There is a need to embrace translingualism in order to avert covert tensions that emanate from the ascription of linguistic supremacy to "standard" English, especially among teachers of immigrant children and in overall public discourse. Drawing inspiration from the 1974 resolutions of the Conference on College Composition and…

For the past three decades, momentum has gathered in favour of a multilingual turn in second language acquisition research and teaching. "Multicompetence" has been proposed to replace "nativeness" and "monolingualism" to measure L2 learners' success. This proposed shift has not made its way into L2 teaching settings.…

While the defining cases of diglossia offered in Charles Ferguson's 1959 article have long been useful as vehicles for introducing this important form of societal multilingualism, they are also problematic in that they differ from each other in a number of significant ways. This article proposes a modified and more precise framework in which…

Concerted efforts to characterise Botswana English (BE), though still referred to as "a variety in development", have validated its existence. However, the teaching and assessment of English in the high schools do not seem to have responded to the development of this variety. This paper discusses the viability of using Standard British…

In the Singlish-"Good" English debate, the use of Singlish (SCE) is viewed as an obstacle to the development of students' literacy skills in standard English (SSE) and so the practice of classroom codeswitching between the two varieties is strongly discouraged. Yet the presence of the vernacular in the classroom continues to be robust.…

This paper offers a historical and sociolinguistic interrogation of Taiwanese to demonstrate the significance of language continuum in relation to identity formation. To this end, Taiwanese is discussed as a particular variety of language. Literacy practices in the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) are contrasted with the precolonial and…