This paper studies the situated meaning given to a so-called "welcome" service for international students at a Catalan university. The official business of the service is to offer support with bureaucratic procedures and information about available services, including those for learning Catalan. However, the complex range of overlapping…

Personal, social, cultural, economic, and political factors influence the language/s used by family members in the home domain. This study examines how family language policies are planned and developed in Filipino-Malaysian families in Malaysia. The language used at home in such mixed or exogamous marriages is also influenced by the ethnicity of…

In situations of language endangerment, the ability to understand a language tends to persevere longer than the ability to speak it. As a result, the possibility of language revival remains high even when few speakers remain. Nonetheless, this potential requires that those with high levels of comprehension received sufficient input as children for…

The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic…

Internationalisation is a buzzword in European higher education, and many universities work hard to devise and implement strategies that will help facilitate increased transnational student mobility. In this context, English is commonly seen as the "natural" choice for university internationalisation, and English is accordingly promoted…

Having been the scene of language planning for more than a century in relation to the two competing written standards of Norwegian, Norwegian language planners are now facing a new challenge: how to deal with what has been termed "domain loss" where Norwegian is perceived as losing out to English in important sectors of society,…

The term "Citetaal" was originally used to refer to the language spoken by Italian immigrants in the Eastern part of Flanders (Limburg) and diffused in the former ghettoised mining areas (the cite). It is a melting pot language, based on Dutch but with a high amount of code mixture from immigrant languages, mostly Italian and Turkish.…

This article describes a multilingual glossary project in the economics department at the University of Cape Town which gave multilingual students learning economics through the medium of English, opportunities to discuss new economic concepts in their home languages in order to broaden and enrich understanding of these new concepts. The findings…

This paper is about the language attitudes that bilingual youth in Singapore have towards their Mother Tongue and English, and towards codeswitching between the two. The language attitudes of 443 primary school students were investigated using a variation of the matched-guise technique. Status and solidarity dimensions of attitudes, with ethnicity…

Reports the findings of a study done to test evaluative reactions to code-switching which involved alternation and/or mixing between the grammatical systems of English and Panjabi. Results are in line with similar studies and show that the same person is evaluated in different ways depending on how he or she speaks.

In a study of Spanish-English bilingual mother-child pairs, three forms of language-switching were discovered: (1) instruction, where information about the second language was given in the past; (2) translation, where the same information was given in both languages; and (3) other types of code-switching. (Author/PJM)

Focuses on intrasentential codeswitching among locally born inhabitants of Brussels, Belguim. The disappearance of intrasentential codeswitching is shown to be related to knowledge of standard Dutch. Apart from this, intrasentential codeswitching is probably no longer a generalized practice in Brussels because the codes involved symbolize social…

Considers social and psychological factors in the language choice of bilingual children and adults. Evidence is cited in two main sectons: (1) the way bilingual children use language to influence those around them, and (2) survey of the language choices made by bilingual mothers who choose to rear monolingual English children. (Author/PJM)

The focus of this paper is on speakers' rationalisations of their everyday linguistic choices as members of a multilingual academic department in the US. Given the monolingual macro-context, the myriad of native languages spoken by participants, and the professional stake in language competence, the question of how speakers arrive at language…

Reports on interviews in representative areas of Galicia, Spain, with both open-ended and standardized items on usage of the minority language (Galician) and the official language (Spanish). The findings revealed that upper age, low social status, and rural residence were associated with minority language choice, and that during adolescence,…