This article compares recent multilingual (auto)ethnobotanical books from Tanzania, Thailand, and Taiwan in terms of the role that the "insider translator" might play in linguistic, cultural, or environmental conservation or development. The books were motivated by similar concerns, but differed in the backgrounds of the authors,…

This article presents a narrative inquiry of a Chinese heritage mother to theorize and explicate how historical, relational, and spatial processes impacted her negotiation with power and agency in relation to her own heritage language (HL) identity development. A narrative approach enables us to draw on participant counter-stories against master…

The language practices of Heritage Learners (HLs) of Spanish are frequently regulated and stigmatized in academic and community settings when their Spanish is perceived as deficient. By ignoring institutional structures that accelerate Spanish loss, the "inadequacy" of Latinxs' Spanish is regularly perceived to be the fault of…

The purpose of this research is to support the language revitalization and reclamation of Nuu-wee-ya', a Dene language from Southern Oregon and Northern California, and to contribute to the discussions on methodological particularities of archive-based research for language revitalization. Nuu-wee-ya' is a sleeping language comprising three…

Against the backdrop of the warnings by some previous studies about the danger of the Yorùbá language losing domains because of the increasing dominance of English, the present study examines the broadcast languages of selected radio stations in Osun State, Nigeria, to ascertain the extent of the threat of English to Yorùbá in broadcast media…

Cross-nationally, urbanization is associated with the decline of minority languages and a shift towards national and official languages. But the processes that link urbanization with language shift have not been adequately documented. In this paper we consider the relationship between cities and language shift from a sociolinguistic perspective,…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

This study adopts an apparent-time diachronic linguistic landscape (LL) approach to investigate the vitality of an ethnic minority language in China, namely the Nuosu Yi ([foreign characters omitted]). Diachronic LL research is concerned with changes in language use on signage over time. It provides insights into phenomena such as language shift,…

The world harbours a diversity of some 6,500 mutually unintelligible languages. As has been increasingly observed by linguists, many minority languages are becoming endangered and will be lost forever if not documented. The increased urgency has led to the development of several global endangerment databases and a more fine-grained understanding…

This study explores language practices of the Blang people and their perceptions of the changes in language ecology through the lens of chronotopes, hoping to better understand patterns of language shift in the Blang community in China. It takes a qualitative approach and draws on semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations conducted…

How does multilingualism affect thinking and behavior? Recent findings demonstrate that multilingualism influences executive functioning, as well as personality traits and dimensions. Concordant outcomes show that multilingual individuals are more likely to be successful at inhibiting certain types of conduct (e.g., impulsivity) than monolinguals.…

Studies on language shift in Singapore have focused on the language use within ethnic communities. However, despite increasing numbers of interethnic marriages, very few studies have explored the effect of such marriages on LS. This article explores the language practices within Malay-Chinese mixed marriages and examines how language policies in…

Many metropolitan cities have undergone rapid demographic changes in recent years, and such changes hasten and widen linguistic diversities. Similar changes are happening in Sydney, Australia and Hamburg, Germany. These changes are most acutely felt and observed in the classrooms where multiple languages are spoken, despite a prevalent monolingual…

The research on language dynamics in the context of migration and integration has been dominated by applied linguists and educators, who described and measured native language attrition and emerging bilingualism among immigrants and their children. In parallel, sociolinguists discussed the role of language ideology/policy of the host society and…

This paper uses the themes of language rights, language choice, and language risk to consider linguistic insecurity in the Northwest Amazon (Upper Negro river) region of Brazil. Because the region is home to a large number of languages (c. two dozen), the idea of preserving this diversity is a popular theme in discourses about language in the…