International travel is still commonly touted as one of the most effective tools for language learning, yet it remains an elusive activity for those without a certain amount of economic or legal privilege. Although physical return to the home country is not always possible for refugees and their families--even one or more generation after…

Chile is a well-known country for its socio-economic and racial inequalities, especially in education. Despite it being prolific, research on educational inequalities has neglected the question about the persistence of colonial dynamics in the educational sphere and how the experience of colonisation has shaped contemporary social relations.…

Languages are not just sets of words. They are powerful tools essential to carry history, traditions, culture and wisdom. In Latin America, Mapudungun, the native language of Mapuche people -- the largest ethnic group in Chile -- can be threatened. A substantial linguistic shift has characterised the panorama of native languages of the current…

Public education policies governing language revitalization and the teaching of indigenous languages have been in place for more than 20 years in Chile. In this journey, there has been considerable progress nationwide in the education of a generation of children in an intercultural socio-educational environment. However, there still exist…

In this paper, we analyse the cultural models (or folk theory of language) that the Mapuche intellectual elite have about Mapudungun, the native language of the Mapuche people still spoken today in Chile as the major minority language. Our theoretical frame is folk linguistics and studies of language ideology, but we have also taken an applied…