Partly as a result of China's reform and opening-up and the broader trend of globalisation, Guangzhou in Southern China has risen to global prominence as a commercial and business hub. Strategically positioned as a centre of 'low-end globalisation', Guangzhou has attracted investors, traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East and South…

This article considers the role that the examination of text plays in empirical language policy research. It begins by examining the state-of-the-art in language policy, observing that a core focus on action represents a shared characteristic of the various strands of discursive and ethnographic research over the last two decades. That is, the…

Ethiopia, with no colonial language legacy, adopted English medium instruction (EMI) policy with the establishment of its first higher education institution, University College of Addis Ababa, over seven decades ago. Over the last two decades, the country has significantly expanded its higher education institutions (HEIs) to increase skilled human…

For centuries, Ukraine has been a site of conflicts over language rights. During 70 years of Soviet leadership, Ukraine experienced'relentless Russification' (Reznik in Language of conflict: discourses of the Ukrainian crisis (pp. 169-191). Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2020 p. 170). After breaking from Soviet rule, the Ukrainian language became…

For over two decades, emergent bilingual students in Arizona have languished under the state's English-only Structured English Immersion policies. Using Theo Van Leeuwan's (2007) legitimation in discourse framework, this study longitudinally tracks shifts in legitimation tactics across the four iterations of the policy--its inception with…

Language policy and planning (LPP) has always drawn on research and scholarship in education as well as the social sciences in general (in particular sociology). Social theory has also figured as an important source of ideas and concepts, and critical LPP has arisen as a distinct strand of inquiry since the 1980s (Tollefson, in Planning language,…

The field of language policy and planning (LPP) has increasingly expanded its focus beyond legislative measures and macro-level policies toward understanding the power of social actors and their interpretation, appropriation, and creation of language policies in societies. This article aims to advance LPP theory and research by offering a critical…

The rising popularity of dual language education programs resembles gentrification in policy spaces where the influx of privileged newcomers coincides with some form of pushing out of the former beneficiaries or their interests, which can include the promotion or exclusion of certain program models. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined…

This interdisciplinary paper shows that investigating community language beliefs, as a pillar of language policy research, can be enriched by the principles of theory of mind. The case study is Malaysia where ethnonationalist law and policy elevates the language and culture of the Muslim Malay majority above those of citizens of Chinese and Indian…

In this paper we explore the nexus of language policy, ideology and power in the linguistic landscape of urban Rwanda. In post-genocide Rwanda, English has been promoted and gained status. This has led to an increased usage of English on shop signs in the streets of Kigali and other towns in Rwanda at the expense of both French and Kinyarwanda.…

Transitional justice (TJ) scenarios are where a society is moving from war to peace or from authoritarianism to democracy. A key goal of TJ is to balance atoning for past abuses of human rights with creating the conditions for social and political stability in the future, and this requires avoiding forms of "victor's justice" whereby one…

In a theory of language policy, managers are individuals or institutions with authority to require others to change their language practices or beliefs. Advocates are individuals or institutions who want the same result, but lacking any power to enforce, can only try to persuade. Language academies can be managers or advocates. Standardization is…

This paper utilizes raciolinguistic genealogy (Flores, in International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2021:111-115, 2021) to explore an historical case study of Spanish Franciscan missionaries in Alta California during an early period of colonization spanning the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. In the study, I apply a raciolinguistic lens…

The current study builds an argument for using Vygotskian "perezhivanie" as a theoretical perspective to explore the becoming and being of family language policy (FLP). We shift the focus from the three components constituting FLP -- language beliefs or ideologies, language practices, and language planning or management -- to the…

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the motivations that key policy documents have put forward as justifications for Sweden's mother-tongue instruction in immigrant and historical minority languages as a multicultural policy that has endured for nearly half a century. The diachronic development of these motivations is analysed in four…