This paper reports a study that used a quantitative method to explore literacy planning in Chinese kindergartener families as well as the influences of socioeconomic status (SES) on it. The conceptual framework of family language policy (FLP), which consists of three components--language ideology, language management, and language practice, was…

Feeling like a different person when speaking different languages has been investigated before and attributed to several linguistic as well as psychological factors. Language proficiency, the context of language acquisition, personality traits, emotional intelligence, and the topic of conversation as well as the interlocutor have been found to…

Located in Catalonia (Spain), and based on the Acculturation Theory applied to the field of linguistics, the objectives of this article are: (i) to detect and study the linguistic acculturation strategies of young people; (ii) to analyse the effects of origin and linguistic acculturation profiles relating to self-identifications with Spain and…

We examined factors determining parental success in transmitting heritage language (HL) and literacy in Russian-speaking migrant families of comparable socioeconomic status (SES) in Cyprus, Ireland, Israel and Sweden. A total of 345 Russian speakers completed a questionnaire about their language use and home language practices. Of those, we chose…

In a nation where monolingualism predominates, heritage language (HL) has been downplayed as less important in educational contexts in the U.S. Disproportionately little attention has been given to the role of HL in language minority (LM) students' attendance to postsecondary education (PSE) (cf. Brutt-Griffler, Janina, and Manka Varghese, eds.…

Forecasting of ethnolinguistic vitality can only be done within a well-functioning descriptive and explanatory model of the dynamics of language stability and shift. It is proposed that the Perceived Benefit Model of Language Shift, used with a taxonomy of language shift motivations, provides that model. The model, based on individual language…

Diasporic communities around the world regularly encounter challenges of preserving their identities and communication practices while adapting to their host social-cultural environment. Grounded in communication accommodation theory (CAT) and informed by recent research on deviance, this study investigated the relationships between Tibetan…

Provides a linguistically valid definition of minority language, as well as language expansion, contraction, and death. The definitional model presented features the establishment of a continuum which also is shown to have predictive power, yielding an effective operational definition of majority/minority status and predicting new data. (Author/CB)