This study examines language attitudes among Mongols in Inner Mongolia, using an extensive questionnaire. Forty Mongolian students who are studying at Inner Mongolia Normal University participated in this study. The results show that Mongols hold more positive attitudes toward putonghua and English than toward the Mongolian language in many…

In the past 10 years, there has been a tendency in Kalmykia to drift away from traditional culture, the foundation of which has been the Buddhist teaching adopted by the Kalmyks in the 17th century, and also, most directly, the Kalmyk language, which has lost its definitive importance in Kalmyk society. Young people of Kalmykia today express…

Most analyses of the sociolinguistic aspects of immigration focus on contexts where a single language is official and widely used. In bilingual Catalonia, newly arriving immigrants find themselves in a situation where the administration seeks to treat Catalan as a fully functional public language while large sectors of the local population still…

The low literacy rates in developing countries have been repeatedly problematized as a major constraint to socioeconomic development by education planners and policy makers. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant rationale for literacy development was one of promoting economic growth. In more recent years, by contrast, literacy has increasingly come…

Are the academic and social experiences of Chinese Malaysian students as much an outcome of the selective acculturation strategy of their parents as the linguistic assimilation policy of the government? Driven by economic necessity on one hand and pressured by cultural preservation on the other, Chinese parents first send their sons and daughters…

This study presents a broad overview of diasporic biliteracy developments in immigrant women after examining observation data in one Taiwanese community. Methodologies include a mixture of narrative inquiry with some ethnographic methods. Fifteen Asian women in diaspora, two Burmese, one Cambodian, one Filipino, four Indonesians, three Thai and…

This paper examines the links between language, social difference and political domination in the practices of parental school choice at the heart of a global city, Vancouver. Vancouver is a highly diverse city, especially in terms of language. Its inner city is replete with multiple languages whose exchange values are not equal. In this context,…

Being literate involves being able to move from the ability to read and write to include different forms of knowledge and modes of communication of the milieu (drumming, dancing, story-telling, etc.). This article examines the new literacy allowed through the existence of two types of schools (bilingual and monolingual) in Burkina Faso, in West…

Research made possible by a National Science Foundation Institutional grant to the University of Arizona. (VM)

Joel Spring (2007/this issue) argues that in most nation states around the world today, English plays a central role primarily as a commodity of globalization. At the same time in the United States, English is being perpetuated in nationalistic terms as the only legitimate language. This is done through a variety of mechanisms such as language…

Describes the rationale and focus of World Language Communities, a core course in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The course emphasizes the social, political, and economic implications of language diversity and the dynamics of natural language and linguistic communities. (SED)

Eight essays in ethnolinguistics were compiled for this monograph. "Functions of Speech: An Evolutionary Approach" represents an introduction to the application of linguistic knowledge to the historical and sociological study of peoples. "Speech and Language: On the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Speakers" expands on the theme of…

Discusses the importance of uncovering the universal features of proper names and relating them to different naming systems. Suggests that this viewpoint may lead to an appreciation of proper names as a sociolinguistic universal and a cultural variable, beyond the particulars on which most of the literature has focused. (MES)

Major controversies which have arisen from linguists' research into Black English and implications of this research for education of dialect-speaking students are discussed. (JD)

Topics addressed in this review include ethnology and traditional dialect study, philology, linguistic conversion analysis, and interaction within the social sciences. Finland's size affects these research activities and research on spoken interaction is shifting to group projects with a common focus. (Contains 68 references.) (JP)