This study investigates how parents of international adoptees explain their decision to pursue birth-language education for their children and how they go about achieving their goals. It focuses on the perspectives of 16 White U.S. parents who have at least one adopted school-aged child (ages 5 to 18) either currently or previously enrolled in a…

This article examines views of Albanian immigrant parents regarding home-language maintenance in Greece. It aims to reveal language ideologies in relation to broader ideologies about schooling and education. Following a qualitative interpretative approach, we conducted semi-structured individual and group interviews with 19 parents of bilingual…

Drawing from a larger qualitative study, this article examines the narratives of bilingual Latina/o teacher candidates in South Texas. The findings reveal that bilingual teacher candidates are linguistically subordinated by the marginalized status of Spanish in the United States and by deficit perspectives of Spanish of the Southwest. Their…

This article investigates the linguistic tools employed by Hispanic Canadian families in their language socialization efforts of fostering sustained heritage language (HL) use. The article is based on data collected during a 1½-year ethnography, and focuses on the metapragmatic devices used in daily interactions. Utilizing analytic tools from the…

Within discourses of language endangerment, life stages such as child language acquisition, adolescent language shift, and the death of community elders figure prominently, but what of the role of other, intermediate life stages during adulthood and professional life in the course of language obsolescence or revitalization? Drawing from long-term…

In Native American communities, the "global here and now" (Appadurai, 2001) is linked to twin movements for standardization and English supremacy, resulting in the decline of Indigenous languages and persistent educational disparities. This article takes up Appadurai's call to democratize research on globalization, juxtaposing theories that…

"Globalization", a prominent and ubiquitous term in the academy associated with linguistic human rights, power, hypercapitalism, socio-political constraints, and social justice, is defined as powerful dynamic global forces stemming from the new world economy that constrict and restrict local contexts, progress, and possibilities--in this case, of…

This article explores uninvestigated issues in Cantonese and "Hoisan-wa" language maintenance from an ethnic Chinese diaspora point of view. Data come from a larger study looking at Frog Story narratives from 140 Cantonese-English bilingual children in California. Fourteen of these children were found to display uniquely "Hoisan-wa" phonology and…

This article presents an overview of the Arabic language in the United States. Drawing on archival research and statistical analysis, the article is divided into 4 major sections. The first discusses the history of immigration from the Arab world to the United States, as well as past efforts at Arabic language maintenance. The article continues…

This article attempts to draw on the legal, policy, and educational experience that we have gained over the past 25-30 years to suggest directions for the future. It is uniquely timed, as we seem to have reached a period of retrenchment after a period of extensive activity. Ultimately, we have to move beyond the present and build on this past…

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…