The modern workplace is international and multilingual. Both white and blue collar employees are expected to be mobile, work increasingly in (virtual) teams (Gee et al. 1996) and to address complex organisational issues in a language that, often, is not their first language (L1). This results in a number of languages forming the ecosystem of…

Multilingualism in the workplace is different from multilingualism at home or in other domains of social life. It has more direct, yet entangled, economic and social implications and serves interactional purposes which can be at any point on the continuum of goal-orientation and relationship-building. Multilingualism in the workplace is both a…

The articles in this thematic issue document studies of grassroots actions in promoting multilingualism across different sectors of society as well as in different social and professional domains. In doing so, the contributors raise issues of the relevance of the notion of community in the age of superdiversity and the researcher's…

This article discusses the problems related to the teaching of the state language, Rumanian, in the context of the Hungarian minority population in Szekler Land, Rumania, and the language ideologies connected to Rumanian on the basis of empirical research. On the one hand, it is argued that at present the methodology of state language teaching in…

This contribution deals with language contact and language conflict in autochthonous language minority settings in the European Union. It rounds up a number of concepts that guide macro-socio-linguistic and macrocontact-linguistic research on language minorities. The description of these concepts results in a list of research desiderata.

The paper argues that ethnolinguistic vitality depends on four crucial social psychological factors: perceived strength differential, intergroup distance, utilitarianism and intergroup discordance. The influence of these factors on the vitality of subordinate and dominant groups is outlined. It is proposed that the vitality of both types of groups…

This paper attempts to show ways in which two Thai brothers (aged 9 and 13) living temporarily in the United States, employ bilingual code-switching to organize their conversation. Using the sequential analysis developed by Auer (1984, 1995), this paper describes how the two boys employ code-switching to negotiate the language for the interaction…

Bernstein recognised that his claims about the role of language in education, and the differential success of children from different social strata were effectively claims about underlying psychological processes, and the relationship between language and thought. In attempting to bridge the gap between macro-sociological analyses and individual…