This study examines physical aspects of place and how such visible aspects work to index a discourse of insecurity, including an insider-outsider binary, particularly through security signs in the linguistic landscape (LL). Our main focus is the relationship between policy and the uses of written language that appear in the LL in different census…

When in 1908 the Belgian government took over the Congo from King Leopold II, a charter was drafted that would serve as a constitution-like statutory code for the new colony. Article 3 in this "Colonial Charter" dealt with language and linguistic rights. It epitomized the duality of language questions with which Belgium remained faced…

The present paper aims to reinvigorate discussions of language policy within language, gender and sexuality studies. It provides initial considerations of a poststructuralist, non-heteronormative language policy for German and English--two languages whose structural make-up differs fundamentally with respect to gender representation. Gendered…

This article explores the multilingual and multicultural aspects of community-building, networking and communication in the European Union's (EU) political and administrative system. We investigated the networking and communicative preferences of EU civil servants and lobbyists using survey data and thematic interviews. Our aim was to gain a…

A cross-national comparative study in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Madrid, Spain examines educational policies and practices that target immigrant students for whom the language variety normally spoken in the host country represents a second dialect. Policy contexts and schooling environments of the two urban centres were analyzed to gain deeper…

With shifts in demographics leading to increasingly diverse student populations, and pressures from state educational accountability offices to streamline budgets and improve test scores, teachers at the secondary level are increasingly challenged to support English learners new to US schools. Teachers, often with minimal understanding of second…

This paper explores language policy and planning from the perspectives of global ideologies, national agendas, and local transformation in two Asian countries, Vietnam and Nepal. Through engaged ethnography, we not only unravel complex ideological contestations of neoliberal and nationalistic agendas, but also portray language policy resistance…

This article describes and analyzes how rural Nicaraguan teachers and NGO leaders are working with a US university-based team to develop a locally responsive, critical, and inquiry-based approach to the Ministry of Education requirement for English in secondary school. This requirement has placed a new and challenging expectation upon rural…

The emerging interdisciplinary work in language politics and language policy and planning studies demonstrates a rising interest among researchers in the interface between sociolinguistics, political science and philosophy. Much of the resulting cross-disciplinary work, however, tends to focus on the subject matters (politics, language) themselves…

The language policy of a liberal democratic state must be formulated in a context of multiple, often conflicting sets of interests and of normative constraints that limit the means by which the liberal state can manage these interests. The interests at stake are, first, those of the individual, for whom language is viewed both instrumentally, and…

Since the 1990s, universities in South Korea have participated in an aggressive movement to globalize their institutions through the medium of English by hiring English-proficient faculty. To attain tenure, faculty must publish in international indexed journals (IIJs), which results in a de facto language policy of publishing in English because…

This article draws on a 23 month ethnographic study of an emerging--newly established and rapidly growing--Latino community in the New Latino Diaspora of the U.S. in order to examine how educators and parents interpret language education policy (LEP). It analyzes how an English as a Second Language director and one undocumented Mexican mother…

An invitation to integrate macro and micro level analyses has been extended to researchers as this integration is felt to be the way forward for language policy research (Ricento, Ideology, politics and language policies: Focus on english, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2000). In turn, the notion of 'micro' in language policy has been…

This article examines the politics of policies promoting multilingualism in the European Union (EU), specifically in light of the recently released European Union Civil Society Platform on Multilingualism. As the most far-reaching and ambitious policy document issued by the European Commission, the Platform warrants close scrutiny at a significant…

This paper analyses the policies proposed by three international organisations to eliminate the use of sexist language. This research compares the main guidelines and recommendations presented at supranational level by the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the European Union to avoid the use of sexist language. It then evaluates the…