Mother tongue-based education has been central to the promotion of early literacy skills in many multilingual contexts of the Global South. However, learners in such environments may face significant linguistic challenges when changing language of instruction during schooling. In particular, the linguistic distance between mother tongue and…

This dissertation investigates a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon found in Irish from three different perspectives: how it challenges phonological theory, how it is used by contemporary speakers, and how its written representation affects its acquisition. Initial consonant mutation (ICM), as it appears in the Celtic languages, is known to…

It is impossible to imagine a modern person with higher education who would have never studied one or several foreign languages and would not be familiar with the culture of different countries. Especially in the modern world, in which knowledge of languages serves not only as a way of cognition, but also as a key to self-realization both in one's…