Multilingual Matters Series

Focusing on language-in-education policies, this book critically examines how these policies shape ideologies regarding the relationships between languages and their speakers. Through detailed case studies and analyses of policy documents from various contexts, it reveals the ways in which these ideologies are articulated and evolve over time, offering insights into the complexities of additional language learning.

The book delves into European Multilingualism, emphasizing it as a dynamic process influenced by policy-making and scientific research. Building on findings from the EU project LINEE, it adopts a multi-focal perspective to explore how languages interact within Europe, highlighting the complexities and ongoing developments in multilingual policies and practices.

Focusing on language modernization in Japan, the book challenges the misconception of linguistic homogeneity by examining debates through a language ideology lens. It reveals how prevailing language ideologies can diminish linguistic diversity, providing insights into the complex dynamics of language change and societal perceptions.

Defenders of threatened languages all over the world, from advocates of biodiversity to dedicated defenders of their own cultural authenticity, are often humbled by the dimensity of the task that they are faced with when the weak and the few seek to find a safe-harbour against the ravages of the strong and the many. This book provides both practical case studies and theoretical directions from all five continents and advances thereby the collective pursuit of "reversing language shift" for the greater benefit of cultural democracy everywhere.

This volume accounts for the motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, using a comparative approach and a broad cross-cultural perspective. It investigates the processes involved in the penetration of English vocabulary into new environments and the extent of their integration into twelve languages representing several language families, including Icelandic, Dutch, French, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Persian, Japanese, Taiwan Chinese, and several languages spoken in southern India. Some of these languages are studied here in the context of borrowing for the first time ever. All in all, this volume suggests that the English lexical 'invasion', as it is often referred to, is a natural and inevitable process. It is driven by psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-historical factors, of which the primary determinants of variability are associated with ethnic and linguistic diversity.

The nine original papers in this volume have been written by international experts and deal with individual bilingualism, societal and educational phenomena, addressing issues such as bilingual usage, acquisition, teaching, and language planning and policy. The volumeas major asset lies in its diversity of topics and in the range of languages and geographical regions covered. The perspective adopted is multidisciplinary, including linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, and applied linguistics.