This book provides an overview of the principles used by policy makers in western industrialized countries as they seek to meet the educational needs of cultural and linguistic minorities. The book synthesises data from more than 30 national case studies and consultants' reports prepared for an OECD-sponsored study.
The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism provides a comprehensive survey of the field of multilingualism for a global readership, and an overview of the research which situates multilingualism in its social, cultural and political context. The handbook includes an introduction and five sections with thirty two chapters by leading international contributors. The introduction charts the changing landscape of social and ethnographic research on multilingualism (theory, methods and research sites) and it foregrounds key contemporary debates. Chapters are structured around sub-headings such as: early developments, key issues related to theory and method, new research directions. This handbook offers an authoritative guide to shifts over time in thinking about multilingualism as well as providing an overview of the range of contemporary themes, debates and research sites. The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism is the ideal resource for postgraduate students of multilingualism, as well as those studying education and anthropology.
In reviewing the international literature on this vital subject, this book examines three groups who seem most affected by unfair language practices in education: women and girls; minority cultural groups; and minority social groups.
The Second Edition of this award-winning volume in the field of language rights and language policy is a timely and useful revision of its core arguments and examples, addressing new theoretical and empirical developments since its initial publication.
The present volume, which is the 5th in the Nigerian Linguists Festschrift Series, is devoted to Professor Munzali A. Jibril, a celebrated icon in university administration, and an erudite Professor of English Linguistics. The title of this special edition was specifically chosen to crown Professor Jibril’s academic prowess in both English and indigenous Nigerian languages, and to mark and laud his official departure from active university lectureship. 72 assessed papers are included from the many submitted. Papers cover the main theme of the volume, i.e. the interaction between English and indigenous Nigerian languages, and there are a number of papers on other secular areas of linguistics such as: language and history, language planning and policy, language documentation, language engineering, lexicography, translation, gender studies, language acquisition, language teaching and learning, pragmatics, discourse and conversational analysis, and literature in English and African languages. There is also a rich section devoted to the major ‘traditional’ fields of linguistics - phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
This is a collection of articles which describe and assess the Foyer Model, a project for schooling minority children in Brussels, which aims for bicultural and trilingual education. It demonstrates the need for an appropriate education model in a culturally and linguistically complex society.
This volume contains a selection of papers on various aspects, mainly linguistic, of the present day situation of the Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland. The papers were given at the Third International Conference on Minority Languages, which was held in Galway, Ireland in June 1986. A companion volume, entitled Third International Conference on Minority Languages: General Papers is also published by Multilingual Matters Ltd.
This text provides an analysis of current policies on language(s) in the USA, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. The linguistic background of each country is examined along with the status of languages, as determined by statute or practice. Consequences for all languages and language education are also analyzed.
The 19th-century European notion of the one people-one language nation as the ideal state has been a very pervasive influence in spite of the fact that most countries in the world today are multilingual, that is they contain ethnic groups in contact and not infrequently in competition. Such thinking has held implications for the setting of language policies, from hanging a wooden clog around the neck of a child heard speaking Occitan in Southern France to the considerable budgeting in Ireland for the promotion of Irish. In this book, Paulston presents an analytical framework for explaining and predicting the language behaviour of social groups as such behaviour relates to linguistic policies for minority groups. She argues that a number of factors must be considered in the understanding and establishment of language policies for minority groups: (1) if language planning is to be successful, it must consider the social context of language problems, (2) the linguistic consequences for social groups in contact will vary depending on the focus of social mobilization, i.e. ethnicity or nationalism, and (3) a major problem in the accurate prediction of such linguistic consequences lies in identifying the salient factors which contribute to language maintenance or shift, i.e. answering the question “under what conditions?”. Part I outlines and discusses the analytical framework, beginning with a general consideration of language problems and language policies and of the social factors which contribute to language maintenance and shift. The author continues to discuss four distinct types of social mobilization, which under certain specified social conditions result in different linguistic consequences: ethnicity, ethnic movements, ethnic nationalism, and geographic nationalism. The argument is that such an understanding is vital to helpful educational policies and successful language planning in general. Part II contrasts and compares a number of case studies for clarification of their diverse courses of mother tongue maintenance. It particularly seeks to illustrate the type of social mobilization discussed in Part I and to understand the social conditions which influence and alter the effects of the type of social mobilization.
The theme of this volume is comparative research on minority languages and development of theories. The three previous volumes focused mainly on problems of definition, on language in society and on the linguistics of minority languages. This fourth ICML attempts to go forward by concentrating, on the one hand, on comparative research regarding minority languages and on the other hand on the development of theories in this field. It allows for a confrontation of different emerging theoretical perspectives.
