This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students' experiences of language choice in communication with people of different ages and in different relations to them in their family and ethnolinguistic community. Concepts of power, solidarity and marked and unmarked choices are adapted to examine the students' strategies of language choice.…

Language practices and attitudes among young minority language speakers in Thailand, focusing on the Kui language, are examined. Sociolinguistic data obtained from three months of fieldwork in the northeastern provinces of Surin, Sisaket and Ubon Ratchathani and in Bangkok provide insights into the language competence, language attitudes and…

This qualitative study uses a semi-structured interview to investigate why Saudi learners stop learning a third language and whether these reasons are permanent or temporary. The participants were six female master's degree students who had experience learning a third language outside of formal education or informal settings. This study identifies…

Though the two languages most frequently used in the homes of Chinese Singaporeans are English and Mandarin Chinese, there is not much information on how the home language can influence language use and attitudes toward these two languages. This study investigates the family language ecology in bilingual homes and aims to compare attitudes toward…

The seventh edition of this bestselling textbook has been extensively revised and updated to provide a comprehensive and accessible introduction to bilingualism and bilingual education in an ever-changing world. Written in a compact and clear style, the book covers all the crucial issues in bilingualism and multilingualism at individual, group and…

This paper provides an analysis of language shift from African languages to English (and Afrikaans) in South Africa, using home language data from the South African population census (1996 and 2001). Although census data have been criticised for its "essentialist" construction of language, they nevertheless provide sociolinguists with a…

Language shift is the process by which a speech community in a contact situation (i.e. consisting of bilingual speakers) gradually stops using one of its two languages in favor of the other. The causal factors of language shift are generally considered to be social, and researchers have focused on speakers' attitudes (both explicit and unstated)…

Discussion of languages in Australia looks at the multicultural makeup of the society, the role of English, dynamics of language contact situations (community language change, intergenerational language shift, other factors in maintenance and shift), societal and individual multilingualism, and support for multilingualism (language policies,…