For centuries, Ukraine has been a site of conflicts over language rights. During 70 years of Soviet leadership, Ukraine experienced'relentless Russification' (Reznik in Language of conflict: discourses of the Ukrainian crisis (pp. 169-191). Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2020 p. 170). After breaking from Soviet rule, the Ukrainian language became…

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…

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…

The handling of linguistic diversity in the Basque Autonomous Community has been an area of constant political debate since the establishment of the Basque-Spanish co-official linguistic regime and the introduction of a process to revitalize Euskara (the Basque language) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much of that debate has materialized in…

Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational…

Depending on different factors, aspects of human language such as orthography, lexicon, and pronunciation can change through bottom-up or top-down planning approaches. This article investigates Kinyarwanda language users' attitudes towards Kinyarwanda orthography change, which was implemented on 13 October 2014 in Rwanda. It also discusses the…

Taking the Norwegian construction industry as its site of study, this article discusses under which conditions migrant workers in the Norwegian construction industry obtain the status as new speakers in the workplace. These conditions are determined by language proficiency requirements and speaker hierarchies that are constructed through language…

In this article I examine lecturers' beliefs about the use of Tetum for academic, scientific and vocational communication at university in Timor-Leste and discuss the discursive and performative language planning roles that they play in the intellectualisation of the language. Drawing on analysis of recorded discussions among university lecturers…

The aim of this paper is to show that the current discourse on languages, constructed as meaningful for Europe's establishment and maintenance as a geopolitical unit, is just the latest round in a much longer debate on managing the diversity of languages taking place within the Council of Europe. From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this…

Drawing on theory from critical language policy literature, this article explores the impact of discourses on in-migration on Welsh language policy. By focussing on discursive debates surrounding the subject of in-migration, the article analyses how a range of actors produce and reproduce discourses on in-migration in Wales and how these…

Since its publication in 2001, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become a highly influential means of describing language proficiency. Its spread has, however, been marked by contradictions, since the framework has been appropriated in the service of a variety of different policy agendas. In this paper, I argue…

In the globalized economy, old metadiscursive regimes have been challenged by new conditions which are often considered to be more favourable to heteroglossic practices. In Flemish Belgium, the liberalization of the TV market is said to have transformed the broadcaster VRT from a public service aiming at educating viewers into a competitive…

Contemporary analyses of language policy often tend to presume ideological uniformity, rather than focus on the contrasts between various positions, and the power struggles that those differences bring about. In this paper, I present an approach that implements the notion of voice in language policy analysis to denote the ideological positions and…

Against the backdrop of growing sociolinguistic interest in transnationalism, this paper uses the notion of "scale" as an "ideological project" (Irvine in "Scale. Discourse and dimensions of social life," University of California Press, California, 2016: 214) to study situated discursive performances of…

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…