In this article, the authors draw attention to the need for ethnolinguistic democracy at a time when linguistic and cultural issues are significantly impacting how schools, educators, students, and curriculum are perceived. The authors delineate the manifold acts of imperialism associated with the colonizing of young minds and bodies as culture…

The Internet has become an important communication medium and it is having a significant impact on language use. The present study takes a "snapshot" of how the Polish language is currently used with modern communications technologies by Polish-Australians living in Melbourne. Through a questionnaire, it surveys which communications…

Inuktitut, the Eskimo language spoken in Eastern Canada, is one of the few Canadian indigenous languages with a strong chance of long-term survival because over 90% of Inuit children still learn Inuktitut from birth. In this paper I review existing literature on bilingual Inuit children to explore the prospects for the survival of Inuktitut given…

The Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul has long existed as a bilingual Greek and Turkish grouping and remains largely unstudied. The sharp decrease in the size of this community to approximately 1000 members raises questions as to the maintenance of Greek in this setting. This study attempts to establish the current status of Greek in the…

The establishment and growth of Irish-medium education has been central to the revitalisation of the language in Northern Ireland in recent years. Historically, the struggle by the minority of Irish speakers in the region to provide all-Irish schools has been both the goal and the engine of renewal and expansion during a period of community and…

The present study reports on the evidence of first language (L1) attrition in a population that may appear to be the most resistant to L1 changes. Russian monolinguals (n=3) and Russian-English bilinguals (n=10) participated in the study. The bilinguals were graduate students teaching Russian as a foreign language at a U.S. university. The data…

This article focuses on the historical development of Kahuawaiola Indigenous Teacher Education Program, the first teacher education program specifically addressing the needs of Hawaiian medium education. The authors distinguish a P-12 language revitalization education approach from those of transitional bilingual and foreign language immersion…

Although it is commonly believed that language and culture are inexorably linked, the precise nature of this relationship remains elusive. This study investigated the hypothesis that a loss in language signals a loss in culture if language is considered a central value. This hypothesis was investigated by rating the Hindi and English proficiency…

The history of Ontario's policies governing Franco-Ontarian education is highlighted in this paper, with a focus on the evolution of cultural pluralism and the struggle for minority French language education self-governance. Adopting a political systems framework for policy making and a pluralist perspective, the paper illustrates the conflicts…

The survey questionnaire and a description of the coding system used for analyzing the data collected in a survey of Cherokee language and education are presented. The survey was designed to study language use, bilingualism, and education in the Cherokee community. The survey encompassed 198 Cherokee children between the ages of 5 and 14 who…

Satellite telecommunications are part of an integrated grid of technologies that make possible what many call the Information Age. The English language is the dominant language of this age and of global telecommunications, based in part on its already clear role as the major "universal" language, especially in science and technology.…

A discussion of the preservation of minority group languages, especially when the group is very small, in a pluriglossic community focuses on the situation of German in Sauris, Italy. The arguments commonly advanced against total linguistic assimilation into the majority language group are examined. Implications in support of minority language…

The role and use of Spanish in the geographic areas outside of the U.S. Southwest are examined in a collection of 16 conference papers. The papers address the general topics of language contact, linguistic variation, sociolinguistic factors, and language maintenance policy, and planning. Among the specific issues discussed are: a dialectology of…

The present language situation among Alaskan natives and the prospects for maintaining the traditional languages are such that in order to plan for a continued native language presence, it must be recognized that: (1) the shift to Engish is a natural result of a set of social conditions, with no single factor or group to blame; (2) the decline of…

French immersion, a relatively new concept in second language teaching in the sixties, is well known in Canada today. Generally developed for Anglophones wanting to become bilingual, the program has tended to serve the needs of the English-speaking middle class. The question then is posed as to what must be done in order to offer the same kind of…