Malaysia is a multilingual and multiethnic country with a substantial population of ethnic Chinese, who use standardized languages such as Malay, English, and Mandarin, as well as various Chinese dialects in their daily lives within and beyond Chinese communities. Cantonese is a community language that significantly impacts the lives of local…

Wisconsin Walloon is a heritage dialect of a threatened language in the langue d'oïl family that originated in southern Belgium and expanded to northeastern Wisconsin, USA in the mid-1850s. Walloon-speaking immigrants formed an isolated agricultural community, passing on and using the language for the next two generations until English became the…

Mako [ISO 639-3: wpc], a Sáliban language spoken along the Ventuari River in the Venezuelan Amazon, has been variably reported as (critically) endangered and threatened. These reports, however, are based on second-hand information and/or self-reported census data. In this article, I present a vitality assessment of Mako that relies on first-hand…

The assessment of language endangerment requires accurate estimates of speaker populations, including information about the proficiency of different groups within those populations. Typically, this information is based on self-assessments, a methodology whose reliability is open to question. We outline an approach that seeks to improve the…

A survey is presented of the Blackfeet language that is used in the Browning area of Montana. The purpose of the survey is to determine the extent to which the language is spoken and passed on at home, and the degree of interest in the language among the young people. The results are presented along with comments where appropriate. Generally, it…

This book examines language attitudes, focusing on individual attitudes toward majority and minority languages and bilingualism. Special emphasis is placed on research conducted on language attitudes in Wales toward the Welsh and English languages. Six chapters address the following: (1) the nature, definition, and measurement of language…