Indigenous communities working to reclaim their languages have called for a shift from the traditional research paradigm of language documentation and description, in which outsider scholars set the agenda, to one in which community language workers take on leadership roles at every stage of the process, possibly with secondary support from…

International travel is still commonly touted as one of the most effective tools for language learning, yet it remains an elusive activity for those without a certain amount of economic or legal privilege. Although physical return to the home country is not always possible for refugees and their families--even one or more generation after…

This study explores language shift and maintenance of Indigenous languages in bilingual contact situations. It specifically examines how factors such as language attitudes favour and deter the use, maintenance and transmission of Nahuatl. Data on language attitudes were collected by means of interviews which covered the linguistic background,…

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…

Today, about 350 languages are spoken and signed in the United States, many of which are heritage languages (HL). A HL is a language to which a speaker has an ethnic, historical, or sentimental connection. This dissertation reports on an ethnographic case study on the language and literacy socialization practices of one trilingual family (English,…

Minority groups in the U.S. typically internalize language ideologies that associate English to social and upward mobility at the expense of learning their home language, let alone other languages. This chapter examines the role that the language ideologies of Syrian refugees in Southern Texas play in a dynamic of navigating a community where…

This article explores Indigenous Mexican mothers' perspectives on multilingualism and Indigenous language maintenance in their children's lives. Drawing on interview data from a larger qualitative study of language and ideology among multilingual children in Los Angeles, California, the article examines the perspectives of four Zapotec mothers who…

This article uses cognitive measures previously developed within linguistic relativity research to explore the thinking patterns of Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children in the Yucatan peninsula. These measures were designed to detect cognitive patterns associated with specific language patterns. Here, these measures are used to test whether 12…

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.…

The border, as defined by Gloria Anzaldúa, is conceptually marked by an ideological site called "nepantla"--a Nahuatl word that refers to a space existing in-between worlds. Nepantla is a performative site for visual art and writing. Making borderlands foods is an active space that exists in-between worlds. Using a performative approach…

Drawing on data from a longitudinal linguistic ethnographic study of a trilingual (English, Japanese, Spanish) family in Australia, this paper suggests that rather than looking at their language use in terms of family language policy, better insights can be gained by exploring the translingual family repertoire. This repertoire is a central…

The Peace Accords of 1996 sought to bring significant changes for Indigenous people of Guatemala by promoting new educational opportunities centering on the recognition that culture and language are critical components of education. Bilingual intercultural programs have been created and attention to the detrimental effects of language loss and…

The younger generations are considered one of the principal agents in the maintenance or shift of any language. In the cycle of the language maintenance, children learn their mother tongue, and pass it on to the future generations. The cycle is broken when they no longer speak the mother tongue. The language choices they make are particularly…

This paper reports on the family language policy (FLP) of three families in a Nahuatl community in Mexico. It investigates the role of: (1) parental experiences, beliefs, attitudes and expectations; (2) child practices; and (3) broader societal attitudes in shaping these policies. Drawing on survey and interview data, the study points to a tension…

Emergent bi/multilingual children have historically been afforded few opportunities to engage dialogically with peers and teachers in posing authentic questions and co-constructing interpretations of texts as their reading instruction has traditionally been skills driven. Additionally, more recent scholarship has identified increased opportunities…