This paper offers a historiographic and ethnographic analysis of how reflexivity, as a communicative practice and valued personality trait, has been understood, regulated, legitimised and used to control Chinese workers from the planned-economy era to the present. Using a Shanghai-based multinational company as a case study, I document how and…

The case study of the article is translanguaging as an educational strategy in preparation for the graduation exam in Romanian language and literature in a Hungarian school in Miercurea Ciuc/Csíkszereda, Romania. Romanian language competence scores are at the bottom of national rankings in this Hungarian-majority town in Szeklerland. Students who…

The aim of this paper is to propose a materialist anti-racist approach to language activism. This approach combines Joshua Fishman's pioneering work on language activism with critical race theory and the recent materialist turn in applied linguistics. A materialist anti-racist approach to language activism, positions language policy within broader…

This article explores the construction and shifting of "expert" and "novice" roles between and within two languages (Japanese and English). Taking a language socialization perspective while drawing upon insights from conversation analysis on epistemics in interaction, it analyzes seven hours of audio recordings of dinnertime…

In the multilingual history of England, the period following the Norman Conquest in 1066 is a particularly intriguing phase, but its code-switching patterns have so far received little attention. The present article describes and analyses the multilingual practices evinced in London, British Library, MS Stowe 34, containing one instructional prose…

The study employs a case study approach to examine the impact of educational backgrounds on nine Hong Kong tertiary students' English and Cantonese language practices and identifications as native speakers of English and Cantonese. The study employed both survey and interview data to probe the participants' English and Cantonese language use at…

This paper advocates a new perspective on languages. It begins by demonstrating that, the occasional disavowals of sociolinguists notwithstanding, the lens through which we in the 21st century, both specialists and laypeople, view languages is predominantly biological. It then suggests that this biological metaphor is conceptually unhelpful and…

This ethnographic case study examines the factors that contribute to multilingual choices and the construction of identities in a linguistically diverse family within a linguistically diverse city, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Based on interviews with a female Emirati in her early thirties, the article examines this young woman's…

European universities have, since the late 1990s, undergone dramatic changes centred on internationalisation, harmonisation and competition. This paper is concerned with two specific consequences of these changes and their interrelationship: rankings and Englishisation, the latter defined as an increase in the use of English at universities of…

Against the backdrop of the ongoing crisis-led migration from Southern to Northwestern Europe, the present paper reports on a case study of two families who have recently migrated from Greece to Luxembourg. Luxembourg has a trilingual education system and many pupils of migrant background face difficulties on this account. Drawing on the framework…

The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how "one-parent, one-language" family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent-child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as…

In this paper I closely examine spontaneous interactions between members of a tri-generation Italian American family. I argue that members show different language preferences and differing attitudes towards the family's multilingual identity but that they all demonstrate a degree of "engagement" with the heritage language. Phenomena that…

A handful of recent incidents hints at an ideological struggle over the use of the English word "fag(got)" and the Spanish word "maricon" in public discourse. This article examines the discursive and ideological struggle over the terms through the comparison of two cases in which Spanish/English bilingual Latinos in the U. S. use what might be…

This article draws on a study of language choice and language ideologies in an international company in Denmark. It focuses on the linguistic and social challenges that are related to the diversity of language competences among employees in the modern workplace. Research on multilingualism at work has shown that employees may be excluded from…

The present study focuses on the language attitudes underlying patterns of stylistic variation in the speech of a female former President of the Spanish local Government of Murcia. We build on previous quantitative work demonstrating that this speaker shows unexpectedly high usage levels for nonstandard Murcian Spanish features in public speech,…