The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers--that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child…

Migrant communities settle and appropriate spaces in their new home through deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation processes, which involve the reconceptualisation of the language and symbols of the homeland and those spoken and used in the diaspora. The public sphere is one of the most distinguishable places where this contextual relation…

Young refugee populations continue to grow. This scoping review aims to identify and summarize studies of programs that provide linguistically responsive practices for children who are refugees. Secondary aims of this review are: (a) to identify the gaps in the literature, and (b) to suggest future research and policy directions. By studying key…

Amidst the rapid processes of industrialization and globalization, the interplay between minority and majority languages has garnered increasing attention, highlighting concerns surrounding linguistic diversity and the efficacious enactment of language policies. This study delves into the intricacies of language planning within the familial…

Minority schools in Greek Thrace implement a model of bilingual education in primary and secondary education, where half of the lessons of the curriculum is taught in Greek and the other half, in Turkish. Although, at an institutional level, the bilingual character of the minority schools in Thrace is clearly defined regarding both legal…

We investigated the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the unfolding of vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in language minority bilingual children, who are educated exclusively in their L2. For comparison, a monolingual control group was also tested, consisting of children of the same age and schooling. We administered a synonyms task to…

The study of language maintenance and shift (LMS) has attracted a large body of empirical work in language policy and planning (LPP) contexts, including allochthonous (immigrant) and autochthonous (indigenous) languages. However, some critical ontological questions that relate to the scope and terminology of language maintenance studies remain…

Numerous studies indicate that the language and literacy development of young children is highly contingent upon the construction of an enriching home literacy environment. Using sociocultural theory as a framework, in this article I explore how a bilingual child's language and literacy acquisition is embedded as a social practice within the home…

This study explored whether the directionality of the relation between majority language and various facets of socioemotional development (three to 5 years old) differs between children with different language backgrounds. 12,951 children (49% girls; 85% White, 6% Pakistani and Bangladeshi, 3% Black, 3% Mix, 2% Indian) from the British Millennium…

Paradis' (2023) keynote article is a timely documentation of the ongoing shift in focus within childhood bilingualism research from investigating the factors that modulate majority or second language (ML/L2) attainment (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011) to understanding the sources of variation that lead to minority heritage language (HL)…

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…

Gaelic is an endangered language, but the traditional music associated with it thrives. Among individuals committed to learning Gaelic as a heritage language who also engage in traditional music-making, intense experiences shape the connection between language and music. The present study examines the connection between intensely motivating 'flow'…

This paper engages with the negotiation of insider and outsider researcher identities in the context of Welsh-English bilingualism in Wales. It aims to develop a reflexive approach to researching bilingualism, foregrounding the actions and experiences of doing bilingual research in a minority language context. Taking data from education and…

Cross-nationally, urbanization is associated with the decline of minority languages and a shift towards national and official languages. But the processes that link urbanization with language shift have not been adequately documented. In this paper we consider the relationship between cities and language shift from a sociolinguistic perspective,…

The Kafoa language is one of the indigenous languages in Indonesia so that needs to preserve it to be in existed category and reveal it as language assets in Indonesia and local culture identity. Revealing the Kafoa Language vitality can be conducted through many perspectives, one of them is through the use of basic cultural vocabulary mastery by…