This book presents the role of ideology in language contact situations and the scope of its influence on linguistic behavior. It will also provide an important addition to the field of Yiddish linguistics.

This book presents the role of ideology in language contact situations and the scope of its influence on linguistic behavior. It will also provide an important addition to the field of Yiddish linguistics.

The ability to speak two or more languages is a common human experience, whether for children born into bilingual families, young people enrolled in foreign language classes, or mature and older adults learning and using more than one language to meet life's needs and desires. This Handbook offers a developmentally oriented and socially contextualized survey of research into individual bilingualism, comprising the learning, use and, as the case may be, unlearning of two or more spoken and signed languages and language varieties. A wide range of topics is covered, from ideologies, policy, the law, and economics, to exposure and input, language education, measurement of bilingual abilities, attrition and forgetting, and giftedness in bilinguals. Also explored are cross- and intra-disciplinary connections with psychology, clinical linguistics, second language acquisition, education, cognitive science, neurolinguistics, contact linguistics, and sign language research.

Employing an approach informed by language ecology and linguistic ethnography, Exploring Multilingual Hawaiʻi examines situated language usage and underlying ideological beliefs to explore and understand Hawaiʻi’s multilingualism. This book begins with a description of the ideologies that developed as a result of contact with the West and then offers analyses that concentrate specifically on the roles of Hawaiian, Pidgin, Japanese, and the languages of Micronesia, and also the occurrence of language mixing in Hawaiian society. Scott Saft’s discussion and analysis underscore how continued exploration of language usage in Hawaiʻi can contribute to our general understanding of multilingualism as a dynamic phenomenon.

This volume offers a synthetic approach to language variation and language ideologies in multilingual communities. Although the vast majority of the world s speech communities are multilingual, much of sociolinguistics ignores this internal diversity. This volume fills this gap, investigating social and linguistic dimensions of variation and change in multilingual communities. Drawing on research in a wide range of countries (Canada, USA, South Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu), it explores: connections between the fields of creolistics, language/dialect contact, and language acquisition; how the study of variation and change, particularly in cases of additive bilingualism, is central to understanding social and linguistic issues in multilingual communities; how changing language ideologies and changing demographics influence language choice and/or language policy, and the pivotal place of multilingualism in enacting social power and authority, and a rich array of new empirical findings on the dynamics of multilingual speech communities.

While standard language ideology (SLI) is harmful in its exclusion of minorities through expression of language and race, translingualism provides a positive scaffolding characterized by the disposition of openness. Translingualism suggests that each utterance creates meaning and is a direct rebellion against SLI. It privileges unprivileged varieties of English over so-called Standard English. In order to combat SLI, scholars have emphasized the need for congenial multicultural spaces where students can use their cultural and linguistic resources as an asset and which supports the idea of students learning from each other through their diversity. Teaching Practices and Language Ideologies for Multilingual Classrooms is an essential scholarly publication that examines the educational necessities for diverse student populations and multilingual students and provides rich teaching resources for guiding the creation of classroom environments that engage multilingual students and support their writing and problem-solving skills. Featuring a range of topics such as ethics, code-switching, and language education, this book is ideal for teachers, instructional designers, academicians, sociologists, administrators, language professionals, researchers, and students.

This book focuses on how sign language ideologies influence, manifest in, and are challenged by communicative practices. Sign languages are minority languages using the visual-gestural and tactile modalities, whose affordances are very different from those of spoken languages using the auditory-oral modality.