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 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…

In Romania most Hungarian-speaking children study in their mother tongue, in Hungarian-language classes. Some of these are organised in 'mixed schools', where parallel Hungarian and Romanian classes coexist in the same institution. Although these institutions seem a good solution for inter-ethnic coexistence, no systematic research has been…

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…

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 outlines a new model of language revitalisation that understands language to be a characteristic of a nexus of social activities rather than an independent object. Language use is one of an overall set of factors contributing to the wellbeing of a particular community. Our model treats language as one node (or a cluster of nodes) in a…

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…