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…

Language planning and policy (LPP), as a field of research, emerged to solve the "problem" of multilingualism in newly independent nation-states. LPP's principal emphasis was the reproduction of one-state, one-language policies. Indigenous languages were systematically erased through top-down, colonial medium-of-instruction policies,…

As interpretations of results from small-scale research sites are incomplete without consideration of the social structures that frame them (Block, in: Gardner, Martin-Jones (eds) "Multilingualism, discourse and ethnography," Routledge, New York, 2012), the current study uses the theoretical lens of agency to examine the language…

This article examines the case of minority language education in China, an area of enquiry that has received increasing attention as new studies report on how the lack of institutional recognition that minority languages receive erodes ethnic minority identities and disempowers social actors living in minority areas. Drawing on Williams' (Marxism…

Scholars have demonstrated that small-scale relatively private family decisions about language are intertwined with parental language ideologies. Using data from the context of multilingual Central Asian families--including those living in Central Asia and those living abroad--this study employs socially situated analysis of discourse and…

This article looks at multilingual, mother-tongue-based language policies influenced by colonial and postcolonial histories and globalization processes. We use multiscalar analysis to show these policies as creative responses to problems affected by national and international forces. Our study focuses on Timor-Leste, specifically a pilot…

Singapore's officially bilingual education policy, in which the majority of children are schooled through a non-native medium with their "Mother Tongue" (an ethnic heritage language that is not necessarily spoken in the home) as a single school subject only, has resulted in dramatic language shifts in the population and high academic…