This is a study of two Australian learners of Indonesian during a short stay abroad. It examines their contrasting success in acquiring L2 address terms, in tandem with their contrasting experiences of the L2 culture setting. It thereby helps explain the persistent finding of great individual variation in L2 gains--and in particular pragmatic…

Australia is one of the world's largest beef exporters. However, meat processing jobs are widely considered undesirable and are increasingly filled with employer-sponsored migrant workers on temporary long-stay visas. Against this background, our paper explores the role of language in the employment and migration trajectories of a group of…

This article draws on a study of language choice and language ideologies in an international company in Denmark. It focuses on the linguistic and social challenges that are related to the diversity of language competences among employees in the modern workplace. Research on multilingualism at work has shown that employees may be excluded from…

European universities have, since the late 1990s, undergone dramatic changes centred on internationalisation, harmonisation and competition. This paper is concerned with two specific consequences of these changes and their interrelationship: rankings and Englishisation, the latter defined as an increase in the use of English at universities of…

This article describes the learning which takes place between children, teachers and parents in a multilingual learning community. It centres on a community-based, supplementary/complementary Saturday class where--slightly differently from the usual pattern--the aim is not heritage language maintenance as such, but to enhance the pupils'…

The situation once described by Hoffmann (1985), in which children grow up exposed to three languages from an early age, is a reality for an increasing number of families. In Europe--as elsewhere--greater mobility is leading to greater numbers of mixed-language couples (Piller 2002), and, by extension, multilingual families. For such families,…

The present study focuses on the language attitudes underlying patterns of stylistic variation in the speech of a female former President of the Spanish local Government of Murcia. We build on previous quantitative work demonstrating that this speaker shows unexpectedly high usage levels for nonstandard Murcian Spanish features in public speech,…

This paper advocates a new perspective on languages. It begins by demonstrating that, the occasional disavowals of sociolinguists notwithstanding, the lens through which we in the 21st century, both specialists and laypeople, view languages is predominantly biological. It then suggests that this biological metaphor is conceptually unhelpful and…

Children of binational couples are often raised in the community of one of the parents and, thus, have limited exposure to the language of the other parent. This study focuses on a British/Moroccan family in the UK, where English is the dominant home language and Moroccan Arabic is the "other" language. Analysis of "live"…

In this paper I closely examine spontaneous interactions between members of a tri-generation Italian American family. I argue that members show different language preferences and differing attitudes towards the family's multilingual identity but that they all demonstrate a degree of "engagement" with the heritage language. Phenomena that I…

A handful of recent incidents hints at an ideological struggle over the use of the English word "fag(got)" and the Spanish word "maricon" in public discourse. This article examines the discursive and ideological struggle over the terms through the comparison of two cases in which Spanish/English bilingual Latinos in the U. S. use what might be…

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…

Although the literature on CS between Arabic and French in different bilingual speech communities is wide, few studies have dealt with the Tunisian context and no previous work has ever been done on the Tunisian business sector as a specific group using more than one pair of languages to communicate. This case study investigates the variety of…

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of interactions between French/English Foreign Language Assistants (FLAs) and their school mentors (MEs), and, more specifically, of how "advice" is sought, given and received. More generally, it will articulate a pragmatic approach (employing the notion of "activity type") that can help achieve this…