This is a pilot study on the relationship between speaking Irish and belonging, with a focus on Irish-speakers of diverse ethnicities and/or nationalities in Ireland. The research includes twelve respondents with diverse backgrounds in terms of nationality and/or ethnicity. We examine whether the language gives them a sense of belonging to…

Private English education has been expanding rapidly across China during the past three decades. This study investigates the resignification of English through the linguistic landscape of a private English training centre in Datong, a small and less-developed city of China. The findings show that the centre draws from both neoliberal discourse and…

From January 2017 until January 2020, the Stormont assembly in Northern Ireland was suspended, with the Irish language being cited as the main stumbling block to the restoration of government. The continued debate around the necessity of an Irish Language Act (ILA) for Northern Ireland is bound up with more general divisions in society surrounding…

In a context of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity and political uncertainty in Catalonia, this article reports on a research project which set out to explore the attitudes of members of independence organisations operating in the city of Girona toward the Catalan and Spanish languages. This study approaches language attitudes through…

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…

The present analysis interrogates the ways that American educators and bureaucrats at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised the project of nationalism and modernity in the newly annexed nation of the Philippines through the trope of 'linguistic unification'. These robust ideologies of language arose from the perception that national…

Language ideologies shape ways in which different learners' linguistic repertoires are positioned as resources or problems, with significant implications for educational access and equity. In Tanzania, tensions between the national language of Kiswahili and high-status English have given rise to two parallel schooling systems, while 130+ local…

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 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…

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…

Do French-Canadian (FC) minorities in New Brunswick and Ontario remain as committed as majority Francophone Quebecers in developing their vitality within Canada's bilingual belt? FCs constitute host communities for interprovincial migrants of FC and English-Canadian (EC) background who can bolster or weaken the vitality of FCs. How FCs and ECs…

A vast amount of literature addresses issues surrounding English and French in colonial and post-colonial communities. However, relative to the spread of English and French language ideology, a limited amount of literature exists on Lusitanization (i.e. the spread of Portuguese colonial ideology by Portugal during colonialism and the role of…

Neoliberal ideology compels people to develop language skills as human capital. As English is considered to be the most useful language for global communication, learning, and teaching, English has been promoted in many countries. However, the belief that English connects people from diverse linguistic backgrounds in a borderless society…

Linguistics is implicated in the colonial project of the invention of "self-contained" "racial" and "tribal units" in the Sudan. This paper has two objectives. First, to historicise the notions of "language" in the postcolonial discourse of language planning in the Sudan by reviewing one of the significant…

To explore language attitudes and ideologies in urban Catalonia, focus group structured interviews were conducted with two groups of adolescents of Spanish-speaking origins: the Autochthonous group, descendents of mid-late twentieth century immigrants from other parts of Spain, and the Immigrant group, who came from Latin America. The…