Many newcomers to Canada experience significant difficulties adjusting to life in their new community, with few more challenging than learning English. While Canada's Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program suggests a pathway to social integration, ideologies pertaining to language and diversity that inform the LINC program can…

European discourse on linguistic minorities reflect the construction of inter-ethnic boundaries between national (such as Dutch or French), indigenous minorities (such as Basque, Catalan or Frisian), and immigrant minorities (Arabic, Berber or Turkish). In the European public discourse on immigrant minority groups, two major characteristics…

In this introduction, we outline the most relevant concepts for this special issue on integration and the politics of difference. This introduction characterizes "integration" as a dominant policy orientation and discursive regime concerned primarily with understandings of language, communication, and skill which constitute a…

This article examines two social categories brought into being by recent migration policies in Switzerland: the expatriate (or "expat") and the migrant. Treating these categories as relationally constituted, the article explores how this distinction was constructed and managed in response to processes of European harmonization in the…

This study seeks to explore the hybrid cultural and linguistic spaces that Portuguese immigrants create in Macau in the process of engaging in intercultural communication with the Chinese local community. I use critical discourse analysis to examine data collected through in-depth interviews and observations in order to arrive at an understanding…

This article traces how a language and soft skills training approach to Canadian immigrant integration emerged with Canada's shift towards a post-industrial tertiary economy. In this economy, soft skills index characteristics of ideal workers that fit the needs of Canada's post-Fordist labour regime. It examines how skills' training is not viewed…

This article explores the impact of superdiversity on linguistic practices in Southampton, UK. Our focus seeks to identify what these practices are in an environment that we describe as superdiverse, and what is influencing, determining, shaping and contributing to these practices. Southampton is characterised by twenty-first century social…

From a critical sociolinguistic perspective, this article investigates the written linguistic practices of 20 labor migrants from heterogeneous backgrounds who organized their life trajectories in an "ethnic" call shop in a marginal neighborhood near Barcelona. This was a late capitalist institution informally providing the undocumented…

This study focuses on the relationships between host family success, social integration, length of stay and acquisition of adolescent language by students on extended international homestay programmes. Degree of adolescent language acquisition and integration is measured by use of two hallmarks of adolescent language: markers of approximation…

The paper argues that ethnolinguistic vitality depends on four crucial social psychological factors: perceived strength differential, intergroup distance, utilitarianism and intergroup discordance. The influence of these factors on the vitality of subordinate and dominant groups is outlined. It is proposed that the vitality of both types of groups…