Linguistic landscape (LL) research seeks to account for the visible displays of multilingualism on public signage. While surveys of signage in the LL produce quantitative descriptions of language contact in a given area, such analyses shed little light on people's interpretations of multilingual signs. Moreover, even within more qualitative…

Scholars have consistently theorised that language ideologies can influence the ways in which bilingual speakers in minority language settings identify and engage with the linguistic varieties available to them. Research conducted by the author examined the interplay of language use and ideologies among a purposive sample of adults who started in…

In this interview, African Language expert Pam Maseko speaks of her own background and her first encounter with culture outside of her mother tongue, isiXhosa. A statistical breakdown of South African languages is provided as background. She discusses Western (originally missionary) codification of African languages and suggests that this approach…

Arizona is the site of many explicit language policies as well as ongoing scholarly discussions of related language ideologies--beliefs about the role of language in society. This study adds a critical piece to the investigation of the role of ideologies in language policy processes by thoroughly documenting language ideologies expressed by a…

This study investigated degrees of mutual intelligibility among 3 structurally related languages in South Africa: Sepedi, Sesotho, and Setswana. To compare reading proficiency of mother-tongue speakers who enrolled for freshman courses at the University of Limpopo, 4 reading experimental conditions, in the 3 languages and 1 in a harmonized text,…

China resumed its sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997. Since then drastic changes in this former British colony have occurred. One of these changes is a shift in language policy, from bilingualism (Cantonese and English) to trilingualism (Cantonese, English and Putonghua). The present study is aimed at investigating tertiary students' use of…

Discusses the historical region of Istria, which is now divided between Italy, Slovenia, and for the largest part, Croatia, and where three national languages, Italian, Slovene, and Croatian function as standard varieties in the respective territories. Focuses on the role of Croatian in language planning and presents statistical data on language…

This study presents the theories that contribute to what the author has called geolinguistics, a discipline that deals with the external fate of languages as they are distributed over the face of the globe. Such a study is relevant in terms of official language planning when legislators seek to impose a given language on people of varied…