Examines bilingual women and their discourses of identities, language choice, and language maintenance in light of new research on gender and language contact. Presents a view of value, roles, and directions of past and present research about gender and language contact and provides an example for future directions through examination of the…

Examines the position of Tamil as an ethnic minority and language in Malaysia, and makes predictions about the prognosis for survival of Tamil in the twenty-first century. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the role of screen translation in minority language broadcasting. The article is a response to a roundtable discussion on minority language broadcasting and language maintenance. (Author/VWL)

This paper examines language reproduction in the family in the context of a highly innovative project in Wales, where the Welsh language has been in decline for over a century. Although Welsh-medium schooling has played a pivotal role in slowing and even reversing language shift in recent decades, there is mounting evidence of the dangers of …

Africa's educational systems are undergoing a quiet revolution. As these systems move away from working exclusively in the old colonial languages, usually English or French, bilingual schools which use local indigenous languages are springing up in many regions of Africa. This paper points out the historical processes driving the bilingual…

This study examines the multilingual and multiliteracy practices of a group of Tibetan female youths from South Asia (India, Bhutan, Nepal) newly arrived in Toronto, Canada (N = 24). The main data are derived from a questionnaire surveying their language practices across contexts indicating the roles of education, community, and society in…

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…

According to the Medical Council of Malawi, one of the conditions for a licence to be granted to an individual who wants to practise medicine in Malawi is the practitioner's ability to speak and write English fluently. This means that the expatriate medical practitioner is not required by law to demonstrate fluency in Chichewa (the national…

This study explores Spanish language maintenance in Southbridge, Massachusetts, a suburban town with a vibrant Puerto Rican community. The investigation focuses on the extent to which Southbridge Puerto Ricans use Spanish and English at home, and their attitudes toward Spanish language maintenance. Survey data, especially the impact of factors…

The notion of site is critical to ethnography and provides a sense of spatial stability--somewhere the researcher enters in order to research what is contained within. Using contemporary understandings of space, the author reflects on two studies to explore the (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography. The first study was undertaken in a…

Language shift is the process by which a speech community in a contact situation (i.e. consisting of bilingual speakers) gradually stops using one of its two languages in favor of the other. The causal factors of language shift are generally considered to be social, and researchers have focused on speakers' attitudes (both explicit and unstated)…

Intended to promote the preservation of the Hopi language, two illustrated children's books present traditional Hopi tales in bilingual format. Based on a story told by Herschel Talashoema, "Coyote & Little Turtle" tells how Little Turtle tricked Coyote into carrying him from the hot sand that burned his feet to Little Turtle's home in a spring.…

This preliminary report presents the results of a 1995 Linguistic Society of America survey on endangered languages. The Endangered Languages Survey was prepared in consultation with other linguistic organizations such as the German Linguistic Group, Endangered Languages Clearing House, and the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of…

There was a time in the Americas when many different languages were spoken by the diverse native peoples. This situation changed rapidly as waves of Europeans arrived, containing and controlling the native peoples, often forcing them to forfeit language and culture. Today remnants of some Native American tribes are striving to find ways to…

Three areas of concern relative to Tongan Americans' acculturation to the United States are the focus of this paper. First, Tongan Americans believe that a high school education is sufficient. Although Tongan families come to the United States in the name of education, once they are here their objectives change. Seeing that high school graduates…