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…

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 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 article draws on two studies of language diversity and adult literacy education in Timor-Leste that were conducted in different regions of the country between 2009 and 2013. Its central focus is on the day-to-day language practices and language values of local participants and the way in which these practices and values relate to national…

South Africa immediately springs to mind as the epitome of multilingual language policies. In fact, its Constitution granted official status to 11 languages in 1996, and the Language Policy in Higher Education passed by the Ministry of Education in 2002 required universities to develop and use the indigenous official languages as academic…

In this study, we examine how mobility and on-going changes in sociocultural contexts impact family language policy (FLP) in the UK. Using a questionnaire and involving 470 transnational families across the UK, our study provides a descriptive analysis of different family language practices in England and establishes how attitudes influence the…

Research that considers the relevant temporal, spatial, and societal contexts of a corporate language policy remains scarce to date within the field of sociolinguistics. In contrast to approaches that take companies as static entities, this article focuses on a Belgian multinational corporation over the course of over 20 years and contextualizes…

In this article, I claim that, while placing his theory of language, language planning, and standardization within a conceptual and historical framework inspired by Modernity, the emergence of the nation-state and liberal democracy, Haugen carefully mapped sociolinguistic phenomena onto their political treatment. And it was this careful and honest…

This paper investigates an abortion clinic's procedural choices regarding the management of linguistic diversity. It focuses in particular on how language serves as capital for clients' agency in decision-making regarding their abortion treatment. Based on linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork in a Flemish abortion clinic, we analyse the clinic's…

The present paper looks in detail at the process of codification, i.e. how a single variety is altered in such a way as to become the publicly accepted, stigma-free variety of a country or major region. There is both implicit and explicit codification. For Haugen it would seem that he was referring to the latter process in which there is formal…

Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world's fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world's second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by…

This article examines "de jure" language officialization policies in Andorra and Luxembourg, and addresses how these are discursively reproduced, sustained or challenged by members of resident migrant communities in the two countries. Although the two countries bear similarities in their small size, extensive multilingualism and the…

Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled 'Dialect, language and nation' (Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and…