Taking a multi-level perspective on language-in-public-space policy, this study investigates the way Tunisia's dominant languages are dealt with in three independent but interrelated activities of language policy: official texts, public talk, and the actual practices of business actors in five commercial districts in metropolitan Tunis. Detailed…

This paper argues that descriptions of Sri Lankan English (SLE) are influenced by ideologies of linguistic racism and coloniality through an examination of the possible reasons for their neglect of Burgher English -- an underprivileged variety of SLE spoken by a minority community. Although descriptions of SLE identify different categories of the…

As a response to the migratory movements initiated at the end of the past century in Catalonia (Spain), its educational system aims to promote interculturality and multilingualism as a way to achieve social cohesion. For this purpose, it is important to improve our understanding of the linguistic acculturation preferences endorsed by local…

The ways in which educators talk about diversity, and specifically about linguistic diversity, reflect underlying beliefs about language in society and influence teaching practice. Semi-structured interviews with 55 high school teachers in the Netherlands were analyzed qualitatively in order to identify teachers' discourse patterns related to the…

Linguistic landscaping (LL) is an emerging field of Sociolinguistics exploring the language in its textual form in public sphere. This paper investigates the visibility and prominence of languages in the public space of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India. A total of 10 city neighborhoods are chosen for the study. The corpus of the study is…

Chinatowns, as neighborhoods for overseas ethnic Chinese, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from linguistic landscape (LL) researchers in recent years. These investigations tend to treat old immigrants who have been tied to the neighborhoods for generations as the key text producers of LL, with far too little attention paid to the LL…

This article argues that multilingual locales with minority, national and global languages at hand can become a site where meaning of social experience is negotiated and contested, and the role of minority languages can be reconceptualized. More specifically, using the example of Tatar, a minority language in Russia, as well as the framework…

This paper forwards the notion that languages are an important resource for sustainable development for modern societies. Informed by theories from both sociolinguistics and language economics on the value of language skills, it is suggested that language(s) have different kinds of value in multilingual societies. Sociolinguists often emphasize…

Adopting methods of the questionnaire, matched-guise test and semi-structured interview among different occupational groups of migrants in Chongqing, China, the present study investigates the correlation between dialect competence, dialect attitude and social inclusion. The results show that entrepreneur migrants have the highest dialect…