The UK has experienced a sharp decline overall in the uptake of languages since 2004, as evidenced by the falling number of entries for GCSE and A Level examinations in languages. At a time when the UK government seeks to reset its global economic relationships as part of its vision of 'Global Britain', such a decline is likely to have negative…

The emerging interdisciplinary work in language politics and language policy and planning studies demonstrates a rising interest among researchers in the interface between sociolinguistics, political science and philosophy. Much of the resulting cross-disciplinary work, however, tends to focus on the subject matters (politics, language) themselves…

Although Japan spends vast amount of money every year on English education and Japanese university students study and are exposed to oral English for several years, there still persists a hesitance to use and speak English. This paper looks at educational policy in Japan and the adoption of the native-speaker model in Japan. Although the…

This article is a literature review and analysis of the links between social cohesion/peacebuilding and the use of Non-Dominant Languages (NDLs) in education with an application for Myanmar, a country rich in linguistic diversity, rife with political conflict, and in the midst educational reforms. Findings indicate that investment in multilingual…

The Republic of Cyprus is a country characterised by a long-term conflict which resulted in the geopolitical division of the island. Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots have lived in separation for more than 30 years until the border re-opened in 2003, allowing people to cross and visit 'the other side'. One of the crossing points is located in…

This article analyses the construction of linguistic value and recognition of linguistic resources in educational spaces in Finland, where Swedish is the second national language and in Sweden, where Finnish is one of five official minority languages. Drawing on ethnographic methods, critically informed notions of language policy and spatial…

Building on recent calls to examine the material realities of people's lives, our paper explores how developments in ecological approaches to second language acquisition (SLA) and recent SLA identity work can help advance the language policy and planning (LPP) research agenda. To this end, we draw on (1) the multi-level transdisciplinary framework…

This paper examines the development of the First Language Maintenance and Development (FLMD) program in South Australia. This program is the main language policy activity that specifically focuses on language maintenance in government primary schools and has existed since 1986. During this time, the program has evolved largely as the result of ad…

Over the past century, missionary educators, nation-state and academic planners, and literacy development workers have used alphabets for political ends for traditionally marginalized languages, and Native peoples have contested such planning with other alphabet proposals. Yet literacy work now often overlooks that there are multiple alphabets…

Several studies on multilingualism in the workplace have emphasized the role of English as a lingua franca. Other studies have paid attention to the interaction between English and local languages in workplaces where global orientations and local languages co-occur. The present study focuses on internationally oriented workplaces in the bilingual…

In the globalized economy, old metadiscursive regimes have been challenged by new conditions which are often considered to be more favourable to heteroglossic practices. In Flemish Belgium, the liberalization of the TV market is said to have transformed the broadcaster VRT from a public service aiming at educating viewers into a competitive…

This article looks at the web comments to two video clips posted on YouTube in 2014. One video features the song 'Sangre Maya', by Pat Boy and El Cima, two Maya rappers from the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico. The other song is called 'Rap de la Tierra' and is performed by Luanko, a Mapuche rapper from Santiago in Chile. First, I discuss significant…

Language issues and social inclusion consistently remain two major concerns for member countries of the European Union (EU). Despite an increasing awareness of the importance of language learning in migrants' social inclusion, and the promotion of language policies at European and national levels, there is still a lack of common actions at the…

This paper focuses on a particular understanding of linguistic justice, one described as the "fair background conditions position." This position has clear liberal-egalitarian roots, and its main feature is the contention that the basic requirement of justice with regard to language is the establishment of certain fair background…

The study focuses on defining specifics of the language policy and planning in the Russian Federation, the USA, and China within the modern political discourse of the 21st century by means of exploring materials from Russian, American and Chinese media. The empirical base of the study included statistical and sociological data describing the…