Indigenous communities working to reclaim their languages have called for a shift from the traditional research paradigm of language documentation and description, in which outsider scholars set the agenda, to one in which community language workers take on leadership roles at every stage of the process, possibly with secondary support from…

This study explores language shift and maintenance of Indigenous languages in bilingual contact situations. It specifically examines how factors such as language attitudes favour and deter the use, maintenance and transmission of Nahuatl. Data on language attitudes were collected by means of interviews which covered the linguistic background,…

The language practices of Heritage Learners (HLs) of Spanish are frequently regulated and stigmatized in academic and community settings when their Spanish is perceived as deficient. By ignoring institutional structures that accelerate Spanish loss, the "inadequacy" of Latinxs' Spanish is regularly perceived to be the fault of…

While considering Makoni and Pennycook's (2006) critique of the colonial nature of the notion of singular languages in this dissertation, a documentation and investigation of English and Spanish use on billboards in Carolina, Guaynabo, and San Juan, three cities in Puerto Rico, is presented. The billboards in these towns make use of Spanish, the…

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…

This article offers a critical appraisal of "educación intercultural bilingüe," an educational model with at least five decades of implementation. When this term was coined, Indigenous populations were mostly monolingual and their settlements mostly rural and distant from the seats of cultural hegemony and power. The situation is now…

Although more than a million people still speak Nahuatl, this number is rapidly diminishing. Historically, Nahuatl was the dominant language of Coatepec de los Costales, a small village in Guerrero, Mexico. The last 50 years have seen a pronounced shift there from Nahuatl to Spanish. The ultimate cause of language shift is a disruption in…

In the present study, we have explored language learning motivation, attitudes and exposition strategies in participants' L2 and FL in an attempt to adopt a multilingual view that better suits the complex sociolinguistic context of the Basque Country. The study includes 200 young multilinguals from the Basque Country. Most of them have Basque as…

Aragonese is a threatened Romance language immersed in a historical process of substitution by Spanish, the official language. The number of speakers who maintained its transmission to younger generations, mainly in rural areas, has extremely declined over the last century. In the meantime, revitalisation efforts have incorporated new speakers,…

The younger generations are considered one of the principal agents in the maintenance or shift of any language. In the cycle of the language maintenance, children learn their mother tongue, and pass it on to the future generations. The cycle is broken when they no longer speak the mother tongue. The language choices they make are particularly…

This paper reports on the family language policy (FLP) of three families in a Nahuatl community in Mexico. It investigates the role of: (1) parental experiences, beliefs, attitudes and expectations; (2) child practices; and (3) broader societal attitudes in shaping these policies. Drawing on survey and interview data, the study points to a tension…

This paper investigates language practices, language attitudes and identity belongings of East Timorese in the Netherlands. Data were gathered through a limited orally conducted sociolinguistic questionnaire and two in-depth interviews on the sociolinguistic trajectories of our participants. The questionnaire shows that second-generation East…

This study examines the motivations of learners studying Welsh in the city of Esquel, Argentine Patagonia. Welsh is considered a heritage immigrant language in this region, given the fact that a group of Welsh settlers arrived in 1865 and established successful settlements. After a flourishing period, the process of acculturation reduced the…

This article takes a linguistic anthropological approach to analyzing multilingualism in the linguistic landscape of the Amazonian city of Tena, Ecuador, a key locus of indigenous Kichwa language revitalization, identity formation, and politics. Following recent scholarly reconsiderations of multilingual linguistic landscapes as sites of…

Spanish in Israel has been the heritage language (HL) of some 130,000 Spanish speakers. The uniqueness of this immigrant community lays in the evolution, existence and maintenance of Spanish as the (HL). This study showcases Spanish speakers as an example of a well-integrated minority. The results of this study showed that the two first…