The language vitality of non-dominant communities has gained increasing attention worldwide with international declarations and national legislation enacted to protect the right of non-dominant language use and development. As information and communication technology (ICT) has spread, extending ICT to ethnic or indigenous languages has lagged.…

This article examines linguaculturally diverse university students' affective translingual practices of using emojis and languages in computer-mediated communication. Research studies have investigated the sociopragmatic uses of emojis from the perspectives of social semiotics, language socialisation, and translingual practices. This study expands…

Local people's sense of place identity might feel threatened in the midst of rapid social change or at a time of crisis, they come into collective consciousness and are particularly likely to assert and highlight their local place identity. Languages (including scripts) become one way for them to maintain an authentic claim to a place and give it…

I explore the ways in which language ideologies are transformed when they are transplanted to diasporic settings as a result of migration. I examine the labelling of Cypriot Greek features as "slang" by young British-born speakers of Greek Cypriot heritage. Drawing on the analysis of data collected in a Greek complementary school in…

The Shiwiar are an indigenous nation of Ecuador and Peru, and they are one of five ethnic groups collectively known as the Jivaroan people. In stark contrast to the other Jivaroan groups, the Shiwiar have largely been overlooked by local governments until recently and are still popularly considered to be an offshoot of their closely related…

This paper examines the history of four Chinese vernaculars which have developed written forms, and argues that five of the patterns Hanan identifies in the early development of Bai Hua can also be found in the early development of written Wu, Cantonese, and Minnan. In each of the cases studied, there is a clear pattern of early use of the…

Senegal adopted French as the country's sole official language at the time of independence in 1960, since when the language has been used in administration and other formal domains. Similarly, French is employed throughout the formal education system as the language of instruction. Since the 1990s, however, government has mounted an ambitious…

Having been the scene of language planning for more than a century in relation to the two competing written standards of Norwegian, Norwegian language planners are now facing a new challenge: how to deal with what has been termed "domain loss" where Norwegian is perceived as losing out to English in important sectors of society,…

This study examines how the language used at home, Putonghua or Cantonese, has influenced the Chinese reading attainment of 4335 primary school students in Hong Kong. Also examined was the influence of the birthplace and home background socioeconomic status (SES) of the reader. Although the indigenous Hong Kong population uses Cantonese, a dialect…

Previous accounts of "europhone" status (anglophone, francophone, etc.) have inadequately addressed spoken-written differences as well as different post-colonial developments taken by Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and East Africa vis-a-vis those of West, Central, and Southern Africa. This article investigates the extent to…

This paper provides an analysis of texts containing the noun "the Balkans" and the adjective "Balkan" in a small corpus of approximately 80 journalistic texts from different south Slavic regions currently available online. The texts were published over the last 10 years. The term "the Balkans" and its derivations…

When Botswana gained independence from the British in 1966, a political decision was taken to designate English as an official language and Setswana, one of the indigenous languages, as a national language. This move disregarded the multilingual nature of Botswana society. Furthermore, although not explicitly stated, the use of other languages…