This book explores individual language policy among bilingual youth who belong to different ethnic minority groups in Vietnam, through vivid stories detailing their life with multiple languages. It examines the youth’s daily language behaviours through the unique theoretical lens of individual language policy, and the ways in which this policy interacts with and is influenced by language policies at macro, meso and micro level. It contributes to research on language and identity, and language policy in non-Anglophone societies and will appeal to a broad international readership, including researchers in sociolinguistics, teachers working with ethnic minority students and policymakers concerned with minority language maintenance around the world.

A study of the impact of language policies on ethnic relations in fifteen Asian and Pacific countries.

This work on language policy covers such topics as: language policy agendas; language policy-making in Britain in the 1990s; language policy in the USA; the case of Australia; developments in Canada; and social justice in the work of ESL teachers.

Drawing on four decades of research, Bernard Spolsky presents an updated theory of language policy that starts with the individual speaker instead of the nation. In this book, he surveys the language practices, beliefs, and planning efforts of individuals, families, public and private institutions, local and national activists, advocates and managers, and nations. He examines the diversity of linguistic repertoires and the multiplicity of forces, linguistic and non-linguistic, which account for language shift and maintenance. By starting with the individual speaker and moving through the various levels and domains, Spolsky shows the many different policies with which a national government must compete and illustrates why national policy is so difficult. A definitive guide to the field, this is essential reading for policy makers, stakeholders, researchers, and students of language policy.

Illuminating, through ethnographic inquiry, how individual agents "make" language policy in everyday social practice, this volume advances the growing field of language planning and policy using a critical sociocultural approach. From this perspective, language policy is conceptualized not only as official acts and documents, but as language-regulating modes of human interaction, negotiation, and production mediated by relations of power. Using this conceptual framework, the volume addresses the impacts of globalization, diaspora, and transmigration on language practices and policies; language endangerment, revitalization, and maintenance; medium-of-instruction policies; literacy and biliteracy; language and ethnic/national identity; and the ethical tensions in conducting critical ethnographic language policy research. These issues are contextualized in case studies and reflective commentaries by leading scholars in the field. Ethnography and Language Policy extends previous work in the field, tapping into leading-edge interdisciplinary scholarship, and charting new directions. Recognizing that language policy is not merely or even primarily about language per se, but rather about power relations that structure social-linguistic hierarchies, the authors seek to expand policy discourses in ways that foster social justice for all.

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.

A detailed overview of the theories, concepts, research methods, and findings in the field of language policy is provided here in one accessible source. The author proposes new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual directions and offers guidance for doing language policy research.