This paper explores the challenges of language and cultural maintenance through education among one immigrant ethnic group, the Uyghurs within Turkey, where the Uyghur population has grown in recent years. Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic minority group of some 10 million people within China, originating from China's northwest Xinjiang…

This paper analyzes, and discusses Maya family narratives as they pertain to the educational perspectives and values they shared about their relatives in East Oakland, California. These were on display in ethnographic interview contexts conducted with families of Maya youth on their ancestral lands in the Guatemalan departments of Huehuetenango…

Shiyeyi is one of the 28 languages spoken in Botswana. It is an endangered language because it is no longer being passed on to the children. This article describes micro language planning efforts to revive Shiyeyi over a period of 17 years. The classical and critical approaches to language planning are applied to this case to highlight the…

The United Arab Emirates have long been in contact with English. Its economy requires high rates of migration, resulting in large numbers of migrants who impact the local linguistic ecology. English acts as lingua franca and occurs in several forms, as labour is recruited from nations having experienced British or American influences. Arabic is…

On June 7, 2021, The New York Times (NYT) reported the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia, Canada (Austen, 2021). News of this mass murder and its subsequent cover up rocked the world and came at a time when Canada and many other countries have mounted…

In this paper, I interpret the perspectives of 19 economically oppressed parents and five teachers from the Indian city of Vadodara, in the state of Gujarat, as they discuss the unprecedented emphasis on the learning of English in education in India. In this ethnographic study, I employed participant observations, sentence completion tasks,…

This paper analyzes Nepal's language education policy from a decolonial perspective, examining how rights-based (neo)liberal ideologies and policies do not necessarily contribute to creating space, either ideological or implementational (Hornberger, 2005), for Indigenous languages in education. Drawing on the theory of "decoloniality"…

Drawing from Critical Latinx Indigeneities, this study explored how Kichwa Saraguro families are (re)creating their Indigeneity and reclaiming their Kichwa language in rural areas of Wisconsin. Using a subset of data gathered through ethnographic work, we report on interviews with 10 members of the Saraguro community as they described the…

A growing body of research on identity and language learning has investigated how immigrant learners construct their identities in the process of acquiring a second language (L2). Much of the research, however, is situated in Western contexts. This study looks at how three Thai immigrants acquired an L2, Cantonese, and constructed their identities…

This article addresses critical issues of how Indigenous (Diné/Navajo) youth construct meaning of their racial, cultural, and linguistic identities within the historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts of the United States of America as a racialized, settler/colonial society. Using Tribal Crit theory, the author, a member of the Diné…

The emergence of Indigenous language revitalization seeks to address historical domination over Indigenous peoples and to recover the loss of ancestral languages as embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems. This paper draws from long-term linguistic ethnographic research on one of the Indigenous Ryukyuan languages: Yaeyaman. I highlight one…

We suggest that while Indigenous languages are threatened by capitalist and neoliberal encroachments, responses from applied linguists in the academy can be misguided. To make our argument, we must first define neoliberalism, and examine how the broader neoliberal discourses of choice, competition and the free market have percolated and distilled…

This article examines Indigenous-language immersion (ILI) schooling, an innovative approach in which most or all instruction occurs in the Indigenous language, with a strong culture-based curriculum. With the goals of promoting language revitalization, academic/holistic wellbeing, and cultural identity and continuance, ILI is a form of sustainable…

Substantially less is known about the motivations of indigenous heritage language learners than the motivations of learners of colonial languages. This study explores the motivations of Maori indigenous New Zealanders and the identity-related motivations they have for learning their heritage language. Interviews with 19 Maori language learners…

This article proposes that acculturation orientations are related to two sets of cultural values: utilitarianism (Ut) and traditionalism (Tr). While utilitarian values enhance assimilation, traditional values support language and identity maintenance. It is proposed that the propensity to either end of this value opposition can be measured by an…