For many years Denmark has had a reputation for being laissez-faire in language matters. There is no explicit language legislation, and the Danish Language Council has mainly descriptive functions. However, there is a powerful standard language ideology, and in other societal domains such as education or immigration, language is heavily regulated.…

In which domains and for which language types does language legislation occur and how easy is it to identify it? The United Kingdom (UK) affords a good test bed to answer these questions since it is often considered to be lacking in strong public language policy due to, amongst other things, a lack of a coherent language policy across the UK and…

This paper analyses the motivations behind the implementation of bilingual education in the Dutch preschool system and relates this to the status of Dutch in the Dutch educational system. Based on the analysis of policy documents and questionnaires filled in by parents and teachers, this study reveals two different underlying ideologies that the…

This paper examines minority language education in the Dutch province of Fryslân from a rights-based approach. To conduct the analysis, we employed a qualitative (legal) content analysis. We explored minority language rights at different levels to answer the following question: To what extent are international and regional standards on…

Family language policy (FLP) impacts the maintenance of heritage language(s) in the family domain, where parents play a crucial role in making language-related decisions for their children. Globalisation, immigration, the COVID-19 pandemic, and digital communication have all affected FLP. Studies are now calling for examining how dispersed…

This study examines how different stakeholders perceive the implementation of language education policy. Even though policies often prioritize a certain solution to the policy problem, the different stakeholders that are involved in the process of policy design and implementation may interpret them differently (Spillane et al., 2002). This, in…

This paper investigates the positions of state policymakers in Latvia on Latvian, English, and Russian in higher education. By using argumentation analysis, the study explores policymakers' statements in two public debates: on the use of Russian as a medium of instruction (May 2018-June 2020) and on the use of English as a language of doctoral…

This study examines how China's LOTE (languages other than English) students perceive English and their target languages as different types of linguistic capital with different values, and how they exercise their agency as micro level LPP (language planning and policy) actors in language learning. Data were gathered from in-depth interviews with…

The study compares the uses of the native-speaker concept as a legitimizing resource in language-standard ideologies and normative discourse in five languages of European origin. Much research and international discussion has focused on the native speaker of English, a symbolically international language. We aim to show how the native-speaker…

In this paper, I draw on interview data with multilingual British South-Asian English language teachers to examine their language attitudes and beliefs about the responsibility for heritage language maintenance in the UK. While all the participants feel that it is important for heritage languages to be maintained, differences emerged with respect…

This article compares the immersion-education systems in Brittany and Wales. The number of Welsh speakers is growing thanks to its well-developed immersion-education system. Brittany has a much less well-developed system and the number of Breton speakers is falling dramatically. Urgent action is needed if Breton is to survive. Using an approach…

This study investigates Spolsky's conception of language policy as the amalgam of language beliefs, language practices and language management. To the best of our knowledge, no quantitative evidence has ever been produced for his theoretical model. The current paper addressed this void, albeit specifically in the domain of Early Childhood Care and…

Analyzing three cases of school-level language policy decision-making in Nepal shows that each school had a pair of language policy arbiters, actors with disproportionate power over language policy decisions. The permissive but passive stance of Nepal's government toward providing multilingual schooling including minoritized languages created a…

This paper proposes a framework for multilingual language-in-education policy implementation, offered as a critically constructive response to India's recent "National Education Policy 2020" (GOI, 2020). Rooted in India's existing educational language policy, our linguistically inclusive 'Languages for Learning' (LFL) framework is, we…

Language planning and policy has evolved from considering policy as one of states' affairs at its early stages to how policy actors exercise their agency to appropriate and enact policy in micro and local contexts. Ethnography of language policy is predominantly used today to explore why policies are enacted in a certain way and not otherwise,…