Identity labels are used by in-group and out-group members to define themselves both referentially and socially. This article explores the use of identity labels in interview data from the Pasifika Languages of Manukau Project, a project that examined the language maintenance and use of Samoan, Tongan, Cook Island, and Niuean peoples in Auckland,…

Language policies in any country exist within socio-historical contexts--embedded in history and influenced by socio-political factors. In Canada, such factors were the impetus to the formation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which was grounded in an English/French partnership and recommended that Canada become an…

When linguistic minority parents wish to develop and maintain their children's literacy in heritage languages (HLs), what can they do to help? How and to what extent do the individual contexts of language use and background affect the development and maintenance of HL literacy, compared with the sociocultural context of community? What are the…

The Nga Manu Speech Contest has grown to be one of the biggest and most positive events for New Zealand secondary school students where competitors articulate their thoughts and aspirations in both Maori and English. The contest is acknowledged as an avenue that enhances language and cultural development amongst Maori youth, yet no formal…

This dissertation is focused on analyzing phonological contact between Slavic and non-Slavic languages in southeastern and northeastern Europe, with the particular goal of describing how the social context of language contact interacts with linguistic factors to shape the outcome of contact-induced change. On the basis of case studies drawn from…

This paper discusses recent trends in language pedagogy that emphasize movement from a psycholinguistic to a more sociocultural view of language teaching and learning. Nourished primarily by sociocultural theory and Hinton's (2002, 2003) efforts to promote the stabilization of indigenous languages, the author presents Narrative Language…

This paper reports on findings from an interpretive policy analysis of the development and impacts of landmark federal legislation in support of Native American languages: the 1990/1992 Native American Languages Act (NALA). Overturning more than two centuries of federal Indian policy, NALA established the federal role in preserving and protecting…

Changes in the political climate in the home country have resulted in the emigration of South Africans to English speaking countries such as Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Despite the scale of movement of the South African population, language maintenance in these diasporic contexts has received little consideration. This paper…

While American Indian language reclamation efforts are often motivated by a desire to learn and embrace traditional culture, they generally occur within multicultural populations in which community members speak the dominant group's language(s), practice its ways, and use contemporary technologies. For this and related reasons, some mixture of the…

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of "ways of speaking" in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a way of speaking is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the…

This paper investigates the retention of Polish language and culture by first generation Polish migrants from the 1980s and their second generation offspring (aged 15-24) from endogamous and exogamous marriages. We examine various domains such as the home, social networks, visits to Poland, institutions of learning, the Polish media, the Polish…

In 2009 the University of Washington (UW) Libraries special collections received funding for the digital preservation of its audio indigenous language holdings. The university libraries, where the authors work in various capacities, had begun digitizing image and text collections in 1997. Because of this, at the onset of the project, workflows (a…

In this article, I show that despite a seemingly inclusive, language-based identity promoted in schools and pedagogical materials, Basque identity and language are embedded with social histories that exclude large swaths of the would-be Basque nation: women and second language learners of Basque. To the extent that these processes continue to…

This study estimates program effects (English immersion versus primary language instruction using varying degrees of Spanish) upon English and Spanish word identification in the context of changing classrooms (cross-classification) from kindergarten through second grade. Letter-word identification is an important predictor of early reading…

In this article the authors postulate a mutual symbiosis between multicultural and inclusive bi-lingual education. Combining bi-lingual and multicultural education to create a symbiotic relationship can stimulate reform in schools and can promote inclusive educational systems, thereby keeping native languages and cultures alive for minority…