We introduce the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), an Open Access digital language archive based on several hundred testimony interviews with Holocaust survivors from the USC Shoah Foundation. The testimonies are a uniquely rich source of information on all aspects of European Yiddish: its regional dialects, grammatical structures,…

The main objective of the article is to illustrate how language ideologies and language management at the macro-level (state language policy), micro-level (in families) and meso-level (local communities) influence language change and the conceptualization of multilingualism of immigrants from Upper Silesia residing in Germany. Language biographies…

Understanding dialect loss is informative for language loss, yet dialect attrition remains relatively understudied. Suru Kavian is an endangered dialect of Pentecost Island, Vanuatu. Drawing from language recordings, interviews, and observations, this paper explores the relationship between linguistic ideologies about Suru Kavian (what members of…

This paper provides an introduction to Lakurumau, a previously undescribed and undocumented Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The first part of the paper is a guide to the Lakurumau documentation corpus, deposited in the ELAR archive. The participants and the content of the deposit, the technology used for recording, and the ethical protocols…

Language revival often retains founding overt beliefs rooted in an ideological commitment to a specific language because of its role as the authentic, legitimate cultural vehicle of a distinct people. Revival is thus the reinstatement of cultural distinctiveness based on traditional language. Revivalists have afforded traditional language…

This article extends two conversations in the heritage language (HL) scholarship: 1) the need to strengthen the linguistic self-confidence among receptive bilinguals (who are typically associated with beginning-level HL students); 2) the need for more critical explorations of receptive bilinguals' self-reported, albeit minimal, spoken Spanish in…

Apart from a handful of studies (e.g., Kinney 1956), linguists know little about what variation exists in Hawaiian and what factors constrain the variation. In this paper, we present an analysis of phonetic variation in the word "keia," meaning "this," examining the social, linguistic, and probabilistic factors that constrain…

This essay is based on a June 2014 interview with Bernard Spolsky, in which he discussed his life with educational linguistics. A self-described "accidental professor," Spolsky directed the first study of Navajo sociolinguistics, established educational linguistics as a field of study and practice, co-created a national language policy…

This paper explores the sociolinguistic practices of a group of young bilingual rappers in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Against the background of ongoing language shift to Spanish in the region, the language choices of a group of Maya youths involved in Hip Hop culture and their agency as policy-makers at the grassroots level is analysed.…

This article explores how a cohort of tertiary-level Uyghur students contested and negotiated their identities through multilingual practices in the receiving community. Drawing upon interview data from fieldwork, this study indicates that these students experienced essentialist understandings and negative views in the host society. Participants…

The religious domain has been identified as an important domain for language maintenance (Fishman 1972; Gal 1979). However, the effect of religion in language maintenance is not always positive (Spolsky 2003). This paper attempts to explore whether religion, Catholicism for this study, plays a significant role in the maintenance of Hakka in a…

The study aimed to explore the indigenous language of Gujjar and Bakerwal tribal communities of district Ganderbal of Jammu and Kashmir, India. The design of the study is qualitative in nature. The researcher employs purposive sampling in selecting the sample. The researcher surveyed 81 Gujjar and Bakerwal households and interviewed 22 (19 Male…

Mako [ISO 639-3: wpc], a Sáliban language spoken along the Ventuari River in the Venezuelan Amazon, has been variably reported as (critically) endangered and threatened. These reports, however, are based on second-hand information and/or self-reported census data. In this article, I present a vitality assessment of Mako that relies on first-hand…

Immigrant integration in nation states increasingly focuses on the importance of learning the national state language. This is evidenced by increased emphasis on rigorous language testing and tighter citizenship regulations. This paper analyses immigrant integration in two sub-state contexts, Galicia and Wales, where presence of a national…

As Indigenous populations around the world migrate, urbanize, and come into contact with a variety of other cultures, they risk loss of their ancient languages and cultural practices. In 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In addition to the broader human rights like employment, security, and…