Since 2015, China has established a 'Group Form of Educational Aid for Tibet' programme to dispatch ethnic Han majority teachers from inland cities to teach in Tibetan schools for a short period of time. Through the programme, the state aims to offer the gift of educational development to this highland area with a concentrated Tibetan minority…

How migrants, refugees and minority groups acquire a sense of belonging in their adopted society is a concern for nations worldwide as they aim to balance the diversity and inclusion of growing numbers of migrants with ensuring harmony and cohesion across society. In postcolonial Hong Kong, the population diversity is accompanied with a swift…

This article analyses how two official languages of Belarus, Russian and Belarusian, are represented on the homepages of two national news websites through the analysis of media discourse within headlines and leads of news stories, and focusing on aspects of multimodality of websites. In view of the equal legal status of these languages, this…

Many contributors to the normative literature on language policy argue that inclusive multilingual regimes are beneficial on several grounds. However, despite the professed advantages of multilingualism, most nation-states have been reluctant to equally recognise minority languages alongside the majority language. This reality raises three…

While current conceptualisations of the inextricable connection between language and culture in English language education are largely informed by complex sociocultural theories that view culture as constructed in and through social practices among people, classroom practices continue to be influenced by mainstream discourses of culture that…

This article presents a case study of the former Yugoslavia, focusing on the role of language in constructing collective identities and establishing ethnic boundaries in relation to political borders. After looking at the variable and frequently multiple language-identity links in the South Slavic world, it examines the part that Serbo-Croatian,…

The need to recognise English language teaching (ELT) as a site for the interplay of cultural politics and competing discourses has been acknowledged in ELT literature. Writing as an English teacher in Japan, and not unfamiliar over the years with the confluencing of discourses whether relating to neoliberalism, globalisation or other forces…

Few studies have addressed the question how the two main linguistic groups in Belgium (French and Flemish speakers) code each other. The research reported in this article is based on a storytelling forum of 56 persons that gathered five times. The storytelling sessions yielded 91 different stories about living in a bilingual society. These were…

Linguistics is implicated in the colonial project of the invention of "self-contained" "racial" and "tribal units" in the Sudan. This paper has two objectives. First, to historicise the notions of "language" in the postcolonial discourse of language planning in the Sudan by reviewing one of the significant…

The Belfast Agreement (1998) contains a clause on respect and tolerance for linguistic diversity in Northern Ireland (NI). It is unsurprising that this clause was included given the role of Irish--and Ulster Scots--in identity politics in the region. The call for respect for NI's languages can therefore be seen as a type of conflict management.…

To explore language attitudes and ideologies in urban Catalonia, focus group structured interviews were conducted with two groups of adolescents of Spanish-speaking origins: the Autochthonous group, descendents of mid-late twentieth century immigrants from other parts of Spain, and the Immigrant group, who came from Latin America. The…

Discusses "language display," a language use strategy whereby members of one group lay claims to attributes associated with another, conveying messages of social, professional, ethnic identity. Examples from academia, politics, business, and advertising reveal language display functions as artifact of crossing linguistic boundaries…

Based on recent theoretical insights into the conceptual role of metaphors, this paper investigates figurative discourse in the current conceptualisation of the European Union (EU) in Polish. The metaphorical expressions found in the data present a cline of conventionality, and many of them display processes analysed by Lakoff and Turner (1989),…

Describes the sociopolitical and educational implications of the complex linguistic situation in Belgium with particular relevance to aspects of bilingualism present in the bilingual and monolingual areas of the country. An analysis and an explanation of the discrepancy between official policy and public opinion with regard to language are given.…

Clement M. Doke's 1929-1930 research on Zimbabwean languages has played a key role in shaping the tribalised and politicised linguistic terrain that characterises modern Zimbabwe. Doke, professor of linguistics at the University of Witwaters-rand, was commissioned in 1929 by the government of Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) to research…