This article focuses on the ever-increasing stress on multilingual education (MLE) in policy documents, especially its pairing with mother tongues in education (MTE). This focus brings into relief the relationship between MTE, the preservation of linguistic diversity and social democracy. We argue that the outcome of this relationship crucially…

Coloniality in education and language policies continues to impact Indigenous communities in implicit and complex ways. In this article, we describe the case of Colombia where, like in many other countries in the Global South, educational policy messages are contradictory. While ethno-education policies purport to sustain Indigenous languages and…

This volume marks the 2022 centenary of the first National Programme for Education in the Free State. Central to the outlook of the new educational programme was the position of the Irish language as a marker of Irish national identity and culture. Education was to be the means to revitalise the language and cultural nationalism eroded through…

As Indigenous scholars committed to Indigenous education in Oklahoma, we use a decolonizing approach to consider how the 39 Indigenous Nations in Oklahoma assert educational sovereignty to sustain Indigenous high school students' linguistic and cultural identities. Seeking to promote education models that sustain and revitalize Indigenous…

Instructed foreign language knowledge -- that is, language skills acquired exclusively in the classroom without the benefit of any significant immersion experience -- remains a vastly neglected area of studies on language learning in general and language attrition in particular. There is also little consideration of foreign language attrition and…

Focusing on language education policies in Bangladesh, this article shows how the policies have distracted people's attention from the harms inflicted on the country's Indigenous communities and their languages. I discuss two factors that have contributed to policy distractions in this context: a strong form of Bangla linguistic nationalism and a…

This paper analyzes Nepal's language education policy from a decolonial perspective, examining how rights-based (neo)liberal ideologies and policies do not necessarily contribute to creating space, either ideological or implementational (Hornberger, 2005), for Indigenous languages in education. Drawing on the theory of "decoloniality"…

Advocacy strategies are characterized by collaborations amongst various stakeholders working together to create changes and reforms. In language education policy, this refers to various types of initiatives and activities intended to create language policy reforms on local and/or national levels. In this paper such activities are traced, analyzed…

In Romania most Hungarian-speaking children study in their mother tongue, in Hungarian-language classes. Some of these are organised in 'mixed schools', where parallel Hungarian and Romanian classes coexist in the same institution. Although these institutions seem a good solution for inter-ethnic coexistence, no systematic research has been…

This book sheds light on the role of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB MLE) as a means to enhance educational outcomes, creating a space for non-dominant languages alongside more dominant regional, national and international languages. It brings together a number of underlying concerns including the maintenance of non-dominant…

Bilingualism has been the subject of a lot of research in the last century. Bilingualism is having the competence to speak two languages. The reasons for bilingualism of individuals may differ. Some of them may have parents from different languages, some may be children of ethnic minority or immigrants. In daily life it is possible to encounter…

This paper examines the intersection of heritage-language education advocacy with anti-racist activism in the 1970s and 1980s in Toronto. The province of Ontario initiated the Heritage Languages Program in 1977. By focusing on discontinuities in the policy's implementation, the paper identifies multiple strategies that Black anti-racist activists…

Language is a contextual factor of an education system as it determines the Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT). In order to provide for diversity in South Africa, the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, makes provision for 11 official languages and the Language in Education Policy (LiEP) promotes respect for not only these…

The emergence of Indigenous language revitalization seeks to address historical domination over Indigenous peoples and to recover the loss of ancestral languages as embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems. This paper draws from long-term linguistic ethnographic research on one of the Indigenous Ryukyuan languages: Yaeyaman. I highlight one…

Informed by the conceptual-analytical framework of LPP and bilingual education policy, this study addresses a unique and under-researched case of heritage language education policy for complementary Polish State Schools abroad. These are Polish governmental educational offering aimed at Polish migrants and their descendants. Data consist of two…