Recent developments in multilingualism and multilingual education in minority-dominated regions in China highlight the importance of policy studies to support the national goals of achieving multilingualism [Feng, A. W., and B. Adamson, eds. 2015. "Trilingualism in Education in China: Models and Challenges." Dordrecht: Springer],…

This study examines identity construction and conflict in the case of a woman whose parents replaced the local language with the official language at the home in the city of Tabriz in northwestern Iran, where the local language, Azerbaijani, is overshadowed by Persian as the official language of the state. In such contexts, Shifting away from the…

Do assimilationist restrictions on a minority language lead to greater national unity or a more rebellious minority population? Under what conditions might short-term backlash to language assimilation evolve into greater national unity in the long term? While much of the literature on ethnic politics implicitly treats language simply as an…

This paper examines the translanguaging practice of two EFL teachers in a Xinjiang university, where English and Mandarin Chinese are predominant but Uyghur is minoritised as a medium of instruction. We focus on data in which the teachers translanguage across all three languages and make a case for the conception of pedagogical translanguaging…

The study explores language maintenance and shift patterns from a family language policy perspective in Azerbaijani-Farsi bilingual families in the City of Zanjan, Iran. The city is the capital of Zanjan province which is surrounded by Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and Farsi speaking provinces giving it a specific demographic make-up to explore language…

This study responds to scholarship that has examined "folk concepts" of (non)nativeness through the lens of imagined ideals of the native speaker, by proposing a framework that integrates both ideals and habits. We operationalize these concepts by drawing from the theoretical notions of chronotope, scale, and habitus. Using data from…

The medium of instruction (MoI) is regulated in the bilingual education of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in two ways. One requires most school subjects to be taught through Mandarin, whereas the other demands that all subjects be delivered with Mandarin as the MoI. A field trip to the capital city, Urumqi, was conducted in 2017 to investigate…

Although Article 15 of the Iranian constitution endorses non-Persian Languages, speakers of these minority languages are latently obligated to speak Persian, the majority language, in most social settings. Consequently, these Iranian L2 speakers of Persian give rise to certain attitudes towards their accented speech, particularly from speakers of…

The purpose of the paper is to shed light on potential driving forces that guide principals' decisions on how to implement language policies in their schools in Kazan, Russia. Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan and home for the second biggest ethnic group in Russia, called Tatars, whose native language proficiency is gradually declining. After…

This article analyses school systems for two of Ukraine's minorities, the Hungarians and the Crimean Tatars with the aim of assessing their success in promoting ethnocultural identity and social integration of the minority youth. I demonstrate that the exclusive instruction in Hungarian ensures the reproduction of group language knowledge and…