Mother Tongue Education (MTE), despite being the most reliable method of learning, is a challenge for the African countries that fail to implement MTE policies due to lack of resources, stakeholders' attitudes towards mother tongues, and lack of political will. Keeping in view the plight of the primary implementers of such policies, hence, this…

Scholars have long critiqued points of view in which monolingual perspectives are seen as normative in research on multilingualism. In relation to this "monolingual orientation," however, in which monolingualism is perceived to be the implicit norm, less work has been dedicated to methodological challenges. As disciplinary perspectives…

The use of English in advertising across non-English-speaking countries is pervasive, often seen as a strategy to evoke prestige, modernity, and global appeal. However, its effectiveness may depend on factors such as text length, linguistic complexity, and local language use, which remain underexplored. This study investigates how Spanish and…

European education policies have tended to cultivate linguistic hegemony and preserve cultural uniformity, which has made it difficult for schools to support different cultural backgrounds. This has contributed to the promotion of artificial monolingual interactions that reinforce linguistic decapitalisation processes. The aim of the review on…

Linguistic diversity is growing in Higher Education, driven by factors like internationalization and digitalization. This trend necessitates a reevaluation of language practices within academic communities. Language Centres play a crucial role in modelling effective practices and reshaping these practices to address the multilingual needs of…

Linguistic landscaping (LL) is an emerging field of Sociolinguistics exploring the language in its textual form in public sphere. This paper investigates the visibility and prominence of languages in the public space of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India. A total of 10 city neighborhoods are chosen for the study. The corpus of the study is…

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study on multilingual speakers conducted in Germany. Data were collected using a questionnaire instrument launched in 2021. To our knowledge, this is the first enquiry into multilinguals' own perception of their spoken languages in Germany. The core research questions addressed in this paper are (1)…

Within the last decades, education has undergone multiple transformations including offering preset syllabi and technology-based modes of presentation to learners. Parallel to these changes has been the emergence of efforts addressing diversity, equity and inclusion, leading to critical discussions on issues within higher education and aligned…

Malaysia is a multilingual and multiethnic country with a substantial population of ethnic Chinese, who use standardized languages such as Malay, English, and Mandarin, as well as various Chinese dialects in their daily lives within and beyond Chinese communities. Cantonese is a community language that significantly impacts the lives of local…

This paper discusses how the political interplay between English-in-society and English-in-education policy in the Global South(s) facilitates what I term 'English as a subtle technology of policy distraction' in postcolonial spheres that were colonised by languages other than English. 'English as a subtle technology of policy distraction' is…

Mother-tongue education has increasingly become a keyword in formulations of development goals, especially the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). Achievement of these goals acquires a grave sense of urgency in light of the ever-increasing threat to the very fabric of our linguistic diversity. The basic premise of this article is that Gandhian…

This paper forwards the notion that languages are an important resource for sustainable development for modern societies. Informed by theories from both sociolinguistics and language economics on the value of language skills, it is suggested that language(s) have different kinds of value in multilingual societies. Sociolinguists often emphasize…

Linguistic diversity emerging from international student mobility, in non-anglophone universities, is typically eclipsed by the existing tensions between the national language(s) and English as 'Lingua franca'. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with university lecturers, this study highlights the tensions surrounding national…

While listeners tend to downgrade speakers' accent and comprehensibility when they perceive them to be from a different language community--a process known as reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS)--research has generally relied solely on quantitative data such as Likert scale ratings. The current study sought to extend the analysis further by…

Considering the contradictions in the structured and static approaches to the nation and national identity observed world-wide and fluid "trans-" approaches to language in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the paper explores how national identity is constructed and sustained nowadays, specifically in digital spaces both…