Focusing on language education policies in Bangladesh, this article shows how the policies have distracted people's attention from the harms inflicted on the country's Indigenous communities and their languages. I discuss two factors that have contributed to policy distractions in this context: a strong form of Bangla linguistic nationalism and a…

Despite Nepal's huge linguistic diversity, maintaining minority languages and providing the mother tongue-based education to non-dominant language children are Nepal's two major obstacles. Scholars have pointed to a negative consequence of the standard language ideology on non-dominant language maintenance and mother tongue-based schooling. Using…

The present position paper claims that language education policy in Europe regarding immigrant minority languages is far from reaching satisfactory results. Despite a tradition of language diversity and foreign language teaching, there are no general distinct policies on fostering and maintaining those languages that cannot be subsumed under the…

In Romania most Hungarian-speaking children study in their mother tongue, in Hungarian-language classes. Some of these are organised in 'mixed schools', where parallel Hungarian and Romanian classes coexist in the same institution. Although these institutions seem a good solution for inter-ethnic coexistence, no systematic research has been…

Translanguaging is an increasingly popular concept used in the description of multilingual practices and in language policy and language pedagogy research. In this paper, I argue that the main reason for the rapid increase in the use of this concept is that it has rhizomatic characteristics. My argument is supported by evidence supplied by a…

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…

Coloniality in education and language policies continues to impact Indigenous communities in implicit and complex ways. In this article, we describe the case of Colombia where, like in many other countries in the Global South, educational policy messages are contradictory. While ethno-education policies purport to sustain Indigenous languages and…

Mother-tongue education has increasingly become a keyword in formulations of development goals, especially the Sustainable Development Goals (2015). Achievement of these goals acquires a grave sense of urgency in light of the ever-increasing threat to the very fabric of our linguistic diversity. The basic premise of this article is that Gandhian…

This paper explores the definition of 'bilingual provision' in vocational subjects in the Further Education sector in Wales, according to practitioners. The research is situated in the political context of the Welsh Government's policy of increasing the number of Welsh speakers to one million by 2050. The research is based on a sample of four…

This article concerns Northern Catalonia, the part of the Catalan-speaking area that today is in France. A Catalan-speaking region until the first half of the twentieth century, the effects of Frenchification -- the acceptance of the French political and economic project in the contemporary era -- and the multiple demographic changes of the…

The National Policy on Education (NPE) in Nigeria stipulates that every child should be taught in the language of its immediate environment in the first three years of elementary education. This paper examines the NPE as it affects elementary schools in Ogu-speaking communities in Southwestern Nigeria. Using the research instruments of interviews…

This article compares the immersion-education systems in Brittany and Wales. The number of Welsh speakers is growing thanks to its well-developed immersion-education system. Brittany has a much less well-developed system and the number of Breton speakers is falling dramatically. Urgent action is needed if Breton is to survive. Using an approach…

Language planning and policy (LPP), as a field of research, emerged to solve the "problem" of multilingualism in newly independent nation-states. LPP's principal emphasis was the reproduction of one-state, one-language policies. Indigenous languages were systematically erased through top-down, colonial medium-of-instruction policies,…

As Indigenous scholars committed to Indigenous education in Oklahoma, we use a decolonizing approach to consider how the 39 Indigenous Nations in Oklahoma assert educational sovereignty to sustain Indigenous high school students' linguistic and cultural identities. Seeking to promote education models that sustain and revitalize Indigenous…

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question…