Investigated the relevance of emotional and familial factors to language maintenance in immigrant families. Information on the family relations of 40 children from Chinese-speaking immigrant families in Sydney, Australia. Analysis revealed that children likely to use their parents' mother tongue were those who perceived their family to be more…

Describes historical and current usage of Indo-Portuguese creoles in the Indian areas of Diu, Daman, and Korlai, examining such extralinguistic forces propelling language transition as social, cultural, developmental, and situational factors, and the nature of lexical and structural borrowing. (48 references) (CB)

Examines Australia's reverse language shift (RLS), presenting eight stages of RLS for immigrant-derived and Aboriginal languages and noting the severity of intergenerational dislocation. Aboriginal languages are dying quickly, and language shift continues in immigrant-based community languages. Steps to encourage second language learning are often…

Addresses the fate of languages acquired during childhood that have not been used in a long time to find out if they are lost, overridden by other languages acquired later, or maintained despite a lack of use. German subjects were tested for their knowledge of Dutch, which they acquired as a second language during childhood. (Author/VWL)

Presents a small case study of language shift in the Teochew Chinese community in Singapore. The study highlights the complex relationship between societal change processes, government policy, people's attitude, and language use. (Author/JL)

This article analyses issues pertaining to language policy in Zimbabwean education beginning with the establishment of formal education under colonial rule. English is the official language of business, government and education, and the dominant language in the media. Official policy, before and after independence, has been characterised by…

This study investigates how immigrant minority pupils in a primary Flemish 5th Form construct their self-ascribed identities in terms of their cultural and linguistic affiliations. Two generalizable findings emerging from these pupils' discourse seem to shed light on synchronic variation and diachronic change in their strategies of identity…

Recent studies by the Management and Coordination Agency of the Japanese government and the Japan Overseas Educational Services (JOES) reveal that Japanese students returning from overseas want to retain their foreign language, and that a majority undertake various maintenance activities. Maintenance classes are widely adopted. Research indicates…

A majority of the population of Friesland in the Netherlands can speak the Frisian language and over 90 percent can understand it. Frisian is spoken by 55 percent of the population but only 10 percent of the population claim to be fluent in writing Frisian. A brief review of the development of Frisian in education suggests that Frisian has a…

Research on factors related to the sociocultural effects of balanced biliteracy involving a European language and an Asian language is reviewed. Becoming biliterate and fluently bilingual in a European and an Asian language involves several complications not involved in acquiring two European languages. The biliterate in such a situation must…

Examines three myths about bilingual education and issues related to them. Topic areas include: types of bilingual education; maintenance, enrichment, and transitional programs; language choice in the bilingual classroom; second language development; and criteria for mainstreaming, the goals of bilingual education, and the linguistic…

Examines the effect in the primary and secondary school levels of teaching through the medium of Welsh and the response of the University of Wales. The media and the educational system are two formal social organizations which help the threatened Welsh language to survive. Another would be the establishment of a Welsh-medium university. (SED)

This document contains 26 issues (the entire output for the 1990s) of this publication dedicated to the study and preservation of Europe's less spoken languages. Some issues are only in French, and a number are in both French and English. Each issue has articles dealing with minority languages and groups in Europe, with a focus on those in…

Ninety-eight children whose first language is Hawaii Creole English (HCE) acquired English without a formal language program while maintaining their first language. Learning the dominant variety of the language in a bicultural/bidialectal environment did not adversely affect performance in HCE. (PMJ)

Exploring the school's possibilities and limits in promoting multiculturalism through bilingualism, the article describes and discusses various bilingual education programs developed in Canada and the U.S.A. in the last decade, giving special consideration to the student populations involved, and discusses the implications of the bilingual…