Governmental language policies in China have varied across recent decades, including the intensive promotion of Mandarin as a language of unification and public championing of regional varieties. Concomitantly, increasing urbanisation, regional migration, and cross-linguistic marriage have led to greater use of Mandarin in private domains. Given…

Amidst the rapid processes of industrialization and globalization, the interplay between minority and majority languages has garnered increasing attention, highlighting concerns surrounding linguistic diversity and the efficacious enactment of language policies. This study delves into the intricacies of language planning within the familial…

This study approaches multilingualism on Phuket Island by means of a linguistic landscape (LL) analysis. The data in this study consists of 185 photographs of shop signs taken from popular streets on the island. They were analyzed via a mixed-methods approach. It was found that different languages were purposely chosen to indicate or showcase the…

China is a nation with linguistic and ethnic diversity. Putonghua, which translates to "common language" is the common spoken language in mainland China, also known as Standard Chinese historically and Mandarin Chinese in English, has been actively promoted for over half a century aiming at facilitating communication among people with…

This paper analyses how teachers and toddlers enact participation frames in bidialectal early education in Limburg, the Netherlands. Teachers' language choice is often context-bound as they use the national language, Dutch, for instruction and the regional language, Limburgish, for playful or social-emotional situations with individual children.…

Chinatowns around the world have been much studied in the linguistic landscape literature. The bulk of this research has focused on Western enclaves resulting from the Chinese diaspora of the Nineteenth Century, which share certain semiotic characteristics and histories. Less research has been conducted on Chinatowns in the East or on newly…

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…

National language planning and family language planning may converge or diverge. As 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the new China, we examined language planning at both the national level and the family level in China. We first revisited language policy and planning in China over the last seventy years through a policy…

This paper examines the use of the two written Norwegian language standards, Nynorsk and Bokmål, by companies in Norway. By adopting a legal perspective on the language policy of Norway as stipulated by the Language Council of Norway (2005) and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Church (2008), the paper investigates how 492 of the largest…

This study was set out to investigate a small number of Turkish EFL teachers' views about the concepts of a standard language, dialects, and other language varieties concerning their mother tongue (Turkish) and the language (English) they are tasked with teaching at schools. The respondents of this research were 12 Turkish EFL teachers working in…

This paper proposes a tripartite model describing the lexical categories across different registers and levels of formality in the Cantonese language in contemporary Hong Kong: (1) native Cantonese words; (2) Sino-Cantonese words, and (3) Anglo-Cantonese words. Examples of authentic Cantonese use were used to illustrate the histories and etymology…

This paper addresses the complexity of the linguistic situation in China by examining the language policy and language categorisation in the People's Republic of China (PRC), which has implications for how multilingual speakers conceptualise and practice 'language'. In addition, this paper examines the conceptual framework of translanguaging and…

What almost all accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the written form of a language as "a significant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language" (Haugen in Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966a; Haugen, in: Bright (ed)…

This commentary foregrounds factors and tensions involved in intergenerational language socialization in Chinese-speaking communities and homes. Of particular interest is the manner in which younger generations in homes in which other Chinese dialects ("fangyans") are spoken almost invariably seem to be shifting to Mandarin, and some of…

This paper examines the dynamic interplay between language policy and local stakeholders in the process of dialect planning in the city of Shanghai, in the context of social tensions surrounding the decline of Shanghai dialect in mainland China. A process-oriented Language Management Theory (LMT) model is adopted as the analytical framework to…