During the mid-1990s, a bilingual intercultural education initiative was launched to promote the introduction of indigenous languages alongside Spanish in public elementary schools in Bolivia’s indigenous regions. Bret Gustafson spent fourteen years studying and working in southeastern Bolivia with the Guarani, who were at the vanguard of the movement for bilingual education. Drawing on his collaborative work with indigenous organizations and bilingual-education activists as well as more traditional ethnographic research, Gustafson traces two decades of indigenous resurgence and education politics in Bolivia, from the 1980s through the election of Evo Morales in 2005. Bilingual education was a component of education reform linked to foreign-aid development mandates, and foreign aid workers figure in New Languages of the State, as do teachers and their unions, transnational intellectual networks, and assertive indigenous political and intellectual movements across the Andes. Gustafson shows that bilingual education is an issue that extends far beyond the classroom. Public schools are at the center of a broader battle over territory, power, and knowledge as indigenous movements across Latin America actively defend their languages and knowledge systems. In attempting to decolonize nation-states, the indigenous movements are challenging deep-rooted colonial racism and neoliberal reforms intended to mold public education to serve the market. Meanwhile, market reformers nominally embrace cultural pluralism while implementing political and economic policies that exacerbate inequality. Juxtaposing Guarani life, language, and activism with intimate portraits of reform politics among academics, bureaucrats, and others in and beyond La Paz, Gustafson illuminates the issues, strategic dilemmas, and imperfect alliances behind bilingual intercultural education.

This book examines the linkage between literacy and linguistic diversity, embedding them in their social and cultural contexts. It illustrates that a more complete understanding of literacy among diverse populations and in multicultural societies requires attention to issues of literacy per se as well as to improving an educational process that has relevance beyond members of majority cultures and linguistic groups. The focus of the book is on the social and cultural contexts in which literacy develops and is enacted, with an emphasis on the North American situation. Educators and researchers are discovering that cognitive approaches, while very valuable, are insufficient by themselves to answer important questions about literacy in heterogeneous societies. By considering the implications of family, school, culture, society, and nation for literary processes, the book answers the following questions. In a multi-ethnic context, what does it mean to be literate? What are the processes involved in becoming and being literate in a second language? In what ways is literacy in a second language similar and in what ways is it different from mother-tongue literacy? What factors must be understood to better describe and facilitate literacy acquisition among members of ethnic and linguistic minorities? What are some current approaches that are being used to accomplish this? These are vital questions for researchers and educators in a world that has a large number of immigrants, a variety of multi-ethnic and multi-lingual societies, and an increasing degree of multinational activity. Beyond addressing applied concerns, attending to these questions can provide new insights into basic aspects of literacy.

Many regional languages across the world are threatened by modernization and urbanization whilst the universal and rapid rise of migration has created new and unprecedented forms of multilingualism. Aspects of education, national policies and attitudes towards minority languages are documented.

"Contributing linguists draw on their latest fieldwork and research, starting with a background chapter on the history of research on the Native languages of the Southeast. Eight chapters each provide an overview and grammatical sketch of a language, basing discussion on a narrative text presented at the beginning of the chapter. Special emphasis is given to both the fundamental grammatical characteristics of the language - its phonology, morphology, syntax, and various discourse features - and those sociolinguistic and cultural factors that affect its structure and use. Two additional chapters explore the various Muskogean languages (Creek, Alabama, Choctaw, Chickasaw), the only language family confined entirely to the Southeast.".

This book is designed for the medievalist interested in contemporary criticism but cautious about its limits. The volume's essays are not designed to offer rereadings of familiar texts, but to address the problems of articulating tradition and contemporary theory. Each contributor interprets critical methods as consciously chosen and spoken "languages," and explores the consequences of combining a traditional and a contemporary method, and hence, speaking two languages. Each essay includes a critical bibliographical note pointing to further reading in the languages it employs.

Language policies are political. They have political consequences as well as political origins. In State Traditions and Language Regimes, scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America shift focus from the consequences of language policies to how and why states make language policy choices. This shift, theorized through the concept of "language regime," inserts an urgently needed political science perspective into the current dialogue between sociolinguists, who research the societal effects of language policies, and political theorists of language rights, who analyze the normative implications of policies. New analytical tools drawn from comparative politics are showcased to analyze paths taken by different states in establishing language regimes, at times disrupted and redirected at critical junctures. Contributions to the volume include analyses of Canada's increasingly court-driven language policies, the United States’ bifurcated language regime in the aftermath of 9/11, Ireland’s conflicted protection of the Irish language, France's linguistic Jacobin tradition disrupted by Europeanization, the role of political parties and coalitions in language regime stability and change in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, Poland's war-torn history informing policy toward regional languages, and the role of English in international peace-building. While other books look at the political and societal effects of language policy, none seeks to employ a historical institutionalism approach which sets language policy choice in the context of power relations embedded in state traditions. State Traditions and Language Regimes offers a comparative politics perspective, one that enriches interdisciplinary debate on language policy.