The standardisation process of English spelling largely came to its conclusion during the Early Modern period. While the progress of standardisation has been studied in both printed and manuscript texts, few studies have looked at these processes side by side, especially focusing on the same genre of writing and by using corpora that are…

Over 50 years ago, the Norwegian-American linguist Einar Haugen published a seminal paper entitled 'Dialect, language and nation' (Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966b), in which he expounds his four-step model of standardization, explaining the development from dialect to standard following a process of norm selection, codification, acceptance and…

This article interrogates the meaning of marginalisation by comparing two non-dominant language communities in Europe, and in particular their language education and teachers. An interdisciplinary exploration of the marginalisation leads the authors to identify key aspects and expressions of the concept. The authors illuminate these broad…

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…

In Scandinavia, plurilingualism has been embraced as an important goal in language curricula. However, research shows that teachers struggle to understand what plurilingualism is and how it can be implemented. To address this lack of clarity, we analysed the curricula for the three main language subjects of schooling in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden…

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…

Local languages/varieties play a key role in the construction of an authentic and local tourism experience. This is also the case in the bilingual town of Murten, which uses its situation at the language border between the French- and the German-speaking part of Switzerland and the local bilingualism to attract and entertain tourists in different…

As global migration and transnational mobility have increased steadily in the recent few decades, interests in equity-based theories and pedagogies have intensified to respond to racially and linguistically diverse student needs in today's classrooms. Raciolinguistic ideology is a theoretical framework challenging monoglossic language ideologies…

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…

This paper addresses the role of bottom-up prescriptive pressures in language policy debates and their interplay with institution-driven, top-down influences. I approach this issue through an analysis of social media data concerning debates surrounding recent orthographic reform in France. Building on Heyd's (Lang Soc 43: 489-514, 2014) discussion…

Over the past few decades, many Southeast Asian governments have promoted English language education (hereafter ELE) as a linguistic pathway for developing human capital and improving global economic competitiveness of their nations. However, Kirkpatrick (2017. Language education policy among the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).…

Lo Bianco (Curr Issues Lang Plan 9(2):155-178, 2008) proposed an "ensemble of [three] activities" that comprise language policy: the "textual," "discursive," and "public performance" (p. 157). When expressed in language, the current study proposes that each of Lo Bianco's three activities (text, discourse,…

This paper compares the sociolinguistic trajectory of a 'latent' speaker mother to that of a 'new' speaker mother. Drawing on Shandler (TDR 48(1):19-43, 2004), it introduces the term 'post-vernacular FLP' as a means to conceptualise the latent speaker mother's emblematic use of Gaelic with her child as a 'seed' from which language revitalisation…

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)…