Most L1 (first language) Japanese speakers in Japan seem to think that they are monolingual. While it appears that Japanese people accept monolingual-ness as normative in the nation, there is little situated understanding of what makes up this Japanese monolingual-ness. This study reports on repeated, long, and mostly unstructured interviews with…

Scholars have long critiqued points of view in which monolingual perspectives are seen as normative in research on multilingualism. In relation to this "monolingual orientation," however, in which monolingualism is perceived to be the implicit norm, less work has been dedicated to methodological challenges. As disciplinary perspectives…

This article uses reflective drawing to explore representations of multilingualism by Anglophone migrants in Luxembourg. Analysing twelve interviews in which participants drew and described their language experiences, we examine the language ideologies Anglophone migrants adopt in response to the ideologies of English they encounter. Participants…

This article discusses family language policy and the tensions between mothers' and children's language beliefs in two Vietnamese immigrant families in Melbourne. These tensions have frequently been discussed from the parental perspective, but it is less common to include the children's voice. We draw on a larger in-depth qualitative study of…

Linguistic nationalism in Western Europe most commonly takes a monolingual form, involving the promotion of one dominant national language. This is not the only form of linguistic nationalism possible, however, as the link between language and nation can also be constructed in more multilingual ways. This article looks at the case of Luxembourg, a…

Dutch-medium schools in Brussels traditionally cater to a Dutch-speaking minority, but they have recently seen a massive influx of pupils with a limited competence in Dutch. In order to face the resulting pedagogical and ideological challenges, many of these schools have intensified their efforts to remain Dutch enclaves in a predominantly…

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…

Indigenous languages in poverty-stricken areas are often threatened by competition from the majority languages driving economic progress. Within the framework of the economics of linguistic exchanges, this paper discusses the possibility of transferring linguistic capital into economic capital, and the revaluation of minority languages to promote…

This paper addresses language anxiety and monolingual mindsets not only as they relate to family language use, but also to divergent social, cultural, and emotional domains of family language policy (FLP) decisions. It explores associations between language practices within the family, beliefs about multilingualism and language ability (language…

The following article attempts to characterise the current changes in the communication of people living in the area of Polish-Czech borderland based on the results of the study conducted in 2018 and 2019. The aim is to determine the dominant mode of supranational communication, as well as the reason behind its prevalence by analysing the language…

Sociolinguists have adopted the concept of 'super-diversity' from cultural anthropology to analyse multidimensional changes in ethnolinguistic identities resulting from recent mass migration. Sociolinguistic super-diversity is thus understood as a central aspect of shifts in migration patterns that have increased the complexity of cultural…

This paper analyses some key historical developments (from early twentieth century to present) in Bangladesh from a socio-historical and language ideological perspective to explore the social injustice faced by the non-dominant and linguistically diverse population. These developments sparked language debates involving questions of identity,…

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…

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…

This paper will seek to determine what types of legislative or policy measures should be considered as morally acceptable ones for the state to implement as part of a language maintenance effort. It will approach the issue from a liberal-egalitarian perspective. As a first step, a series of normative constraints that liberal-egalitarians would…