Early years' immersion education programmes can be either monolingual or bilingual, and their objectives can range from language maintenance and/or enrichment to early second language learning, depending on the context of implementation. Here we examine some of the key issues and policy concerns relating to immersion education in the early…

Since the post-Soviet context is not particularly well known to the majority of readers, the author uses this introduction to provide a general background against which developments in particular post-Soviet countries can be better understood. The author begins by placing these developments in the sociohistoric context of language policies of the…

Examines the place of Arabic in language education and language planning activities in Nigeria, highlighting its uses from the nineteenth century to present, methods and content of Arabic education, contributions to historical documentation in pre-colonial Nigeria and lexical expansion of Nigerian languages, and decline in its status and role. (34…

This article describes several language-related projects undertaken by the European Community to promote multilinguality and improved cross-national communication. It also describes four systems of bilingual education operating in individual Member States (Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Catalan and Basque regions of Spain). (Contains 15 references.)…

The native languages of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia are reviewed in this brief summary of Indochinese refugee characteristics. General background information on each country is followed by a description of the linguistic diversity of the area and a chart showing the three principal linguistic families: Austroasiatic, Tai, and Sino-Tibetan. A…

Proposes a model of target- and native-language proverb comparison which can be used to assist proverb analysis in the language curriculum, using examples from Mandinka, a West African language. (Author/CB)

Presents a review of the literature dealing with the theory of the naming of colors. A comparison is made between the names of colors in Italian and Dutch, discussing the differences between languages in terms of the influence of the sociocultural context. (61 references) (CFM)

Analyzes the devoicing of voiced fricatives in Southern Standard Dutch (spoken in Belgium) and Northern Standard Dutch (spoken in the Netherlands) based on archived recordings of radio broadcasts from 1935-93. Findings reveal a divergence between the two language varieties in the pronunciation of voiced fricatives in this period. (54 references)…

Attempts to ascertain why Irish revivalist efforts have not led to a revitalization of the language of the type associated with Hebrew. Analyzes the historical issues surrounding these efforts outside the "Gaeltacht" community, with a view to understanding the conditions and processes that should have existed for revitalization. (33…

Discusses the signals that are used to create, sustain, and end conversational involvement in two different languages, with examples provided of paralinguistic attention getters, linguistic conversation initiation signals, "in-tune" signals, and "face-saving" signals from a study of English and Greek. (CB)

Assesses the potential of selected aspects of geolinguistic analysis for the understanding of multilingual cities and outlines a research agenda highlighting the need for increased comparative research on urban multilingualism. The article illustrates the agenda with reference to a geographical information systems (GIS) analysis of language in…

Compares two separate classroom ethnographies in higher educational institutions--one on African American students learning academic writing and another on Sri Lankan Tamil students learning English for general purposes. Attempts to overcome the separation of the concerns of bilingual and bidialectal minority students in English-language teaching.…

The development of effective skills and basic competencies in written English for Ute students in a reservation public school system and adult Ute learners seeking high school equivalency certificates is discussed. The focus of analysis is on assessing the Ute students' assumptions about written language and their use of those assumptions when…

Focuses on language restoration in a situation where people start again to use a language as the language of the home and to speak it to newborn children after a period when these uses were extinct. Specifically considers the conditions accounting for Hebrew language revitalization and compares this situation with efforts to revitalize the Maori…

An experiment compared the tagging of two languages: Czech, a highly inflected language with a high degree of ambiguity, and English. For Czech, the corpus was one gathered in the 1970s at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences; for English, it was the Wall Street Journal corpus. Results indicate 81.53 percent accuracy for Czech and 96.83 percent…