Gives an overview of the history of the Hawaiian language and the decline in number of speakers, chronicles efforts to revitalize it, and discusses the role of computing and online communications in this process, focusing on the Leoki bulletin board system, the first fully based on an indigenous language. Activities in an elementary school…

An African American teacher of English discusses her own experience with black English as a barrier to academic success, her efforts to assure that her own students speak standard English and to understand why many teachers do not stress this and the need to understand why many African American students do not use standard English despite its…

Examines the position of Tamil as the language of an ethnic minority in Malaysia and Singapore, placing the issue of Tamil and language maintenance within the larger sociolinguistic milieu in the two countries and drawing conclusions about the role of language policy and planning in the determination of linguistic outcomes. (SM)

Net gains in the number of Welsh speakers as a result of education in South East Wales are examined to see if there is any basis for connecting them with disadvantage to education in English-medium schools. (Author/JL)

Introduces a collection of papers that address issues related to the maintenance and revitalization of indigenous languages in Latin and Central America. Two papers focus on the case of Quechua, another considers bilingual intercultural education to help sustain the Harakmbut languages in Peru, and the last considers one of three native language…

Examines whether there is a strong relationship between second language learners' noticing of benefactive auxiliary verbs and their use in communication. Participants were university students who had acquired Japanese at home without receiving any formal instruction. Data were collected in face-to-face interviews, an interpretation task with 20…

The article discusses how Sinte Gleska University (SGU), South Dakota, has been promoting Lakota language since its inception. SGU is the first tribal-based university in the U.S. White Hat, a teacher from SGU, has been promoting Lakota language through his impressive style of teaching. The university requires every SGU student to opt for Lakota…

Examples of effective community-based action in defence of minority indigenous language are relatively few. However, three indigenous language committees of Northwest Cameroon, the Bafut, Kom and Nso' language committees, provide dynamic models of the role that community-based organisations can play in the development and maintenance of minority…

This paper examines the role that cultural identity and grassroots activism and community development have played in the creation, maintenance and expansion of Louisiana French immersion education. Although linguists tend to portray the extinction of endangered minority languages as inevitable, research on the effects of minority language…

Since the cessation of Soviet hegemony the Baltic Republics have endured drastic changes in their political, economic, social and linguistic situation. The official reinstatement of the respective state languages has been a key feature in the establishment of their newly regained national independence. Consequently, large sections of the…

This paper examines the teaching and use of, as well as the attitude towards, English among China's ethnic minorities. Starting with a critique of China English, a term used with increasing frequency in the literature on World Englishes and English nativised in the Chinese context, the paper attempts to show that English has yet to find its way…

This paper applies the management model of language to Romani in the Czech Republic, showing how intellectualisation processes in discourse lead to the solution of problems associated with the creation of functional dialects or Languages for Special Purposes (LSP). These problems include, but are not limited to, the building-up of terminologies.…

Language transmission occurs both in the domestic and in the public domain. These domains are typically represented by the home and the school. Viewed from the perspectives of majority-language versus minority-language speakers, language transmission becomes a very different issue. In the case of majority language speakers, language transmission…

Heritage languages (HL) are language spoken by the children of immigrants or by those who immigrated to a country when young. The purpose of this article is to briefly review what is known about heritage language development over time and to identify some gaps in people's knowledge. In this article, the authors consider three aspects: how much HL…

This paper identifies: (a) discourses that shape immigrant parents' and early childhood educators' views of young children's bilingual development, and (b) ways in which these discourses are manifested in the everyday lives of immigrant parents as well as in the practices of early childhood educators. The findings of a study in a mid-size Canadian…