Indonesia's linguistic landscape is among the most diverse in the world, yet its many indigenous and minority languages face increasing marginalization amid the widespread use of Bahasa Indonesia and English. This study examined university students' perspectives on language diversity and the preservation of heritage languages within the context of…

This paper discusses the role of the Catholic Church amongst the Maltese diaspora in Australia, and its impact on the maintenance of the Maltese language, a small community language spoken largely by the first generation of immigrants who left Malta after the Second World War. The study is based on interview data collected among three generations…

Purpose: Narratives have been a useful tool for evaluating language skills in young bilingual children. This study extends that work to bilingual adolescents by (a) describing their narrative skills and (b) evaluating the role of current language experience on measures of narrative micro- and macrostructure across Spanish and English. Method:…

Language plays a crucial role in education; yet, while issues of language are undoubtedly relevant to all teachers, school-level language policies, which aim to provide explicit guidance underpinned by a clear set of principles, are too often conspicuous by their absence. In a range of educational contexts around the world it has been found that…

Bilingualism continues to increase with more than 350 different languages spoken in the United States, and more than 21% of people over the age of five (approximately 66 million people) speaking a language other than English at home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). Many bilingual children in the US speak a minority first language (L1) and English as…

This qualitative phenomenological study explores teachers' and bilingual adolescents' views about heritage language (HL) maintenance and bilingualism. Interviews with twelve teachers and twelve students revealed limited value for bilingualism. English dominance overshadowed the importance of bilingualism and HL maintenance. Findings reveal the…

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…

The current study examines the bilingual language development of twelve young children. We focus on the use of Spanish as a heritage language among the children while they learn English in an English-majority environment. Data was collected in English and Spanish four times over the first two years of formal schooling. The study focuses on oral…

In this paper, I examine the changing currency of languages in the context of migration and mobility based on case studies of Filipino migrants in Australia. Drawing on two sociolinguistic studies conducted with and for Filipino migrants, I highlight how the "monolingual mindset" (Clyne, 2008) reinforced by the "White-English…

Studies on Brunei Malay have made inconsistent findings: while some have asserted that this variety is thriving and is in no way endangered, others have found that its use is now waning. As the dynamics of family speech can inform what is happening linguistically at the community level, this study seeks to investigate the family language policies…

Drawing on the concept of family language policy (FLP), this paper reports on how four Chinese-English interlingual families maintain the minority language of Chinese with their preteenager children in Australia. The study takes an integrative approach to explore both parents' and children's perspectives on language development. While highlighting…

This study aims to explore how a group of Chinese American families transcend essentialist thinking through negotiating with different ideological orientations toward their heritage language and how these families' different ideological profiles could influence the home language maintenance. Data were collected through three rounds of…

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…

With a focus on an under-studied group of immigrants in the UK, this paper examines Iranian families' language ideologies and practices at home in relation to Persian acquisition and maintenance for their children. Working within a family language policy (FLP) framework, we draw on sociolinguistic data from semi-structured interviews with eighteen…

Bilingual parents must often make difficult and complex choices about which languages to use with their children. While existing research has explored family language practices and attitudes within certain language communities, the experiences of African parents are conspicuously absent from the literature. This study explores factors influencing…