Language Planning is a resurgent academic discipline, reflecting the importance of language in issues of migration, globalisation, cultural diversity, nation-building, education and ethnic identity. Written as an advanced introduction, this book engages with all these themes but focuses specifically on language planning as it relates to education, addressing such issues as bilingualism and the education of linguistic minority pupils in North America and Europe, the educational and equity implications of the global spread of English, and the choice of media of instruction in post-colonial societies. Contextualising this discussion, the first two chapters describe the emergence and evolution of language planning as an academic discipline, and introduce key concepts in the practice of language planning. The book is wide-ranging in its coverage, with detailed discussion of the context of language policy in a variety of countries and communities across North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

This book is a timely comparison of the divergent worlds of policy implementation and policy ambition, the messy, often contradictory here-and-now reality of languages in schools and the sharp-edged, shiny, future-oriented representation of languages in policy. Two deep rooted tendencies in Australian political and social life, multiculturalism and Asian regionalism, are represented as key phases in the country’s experimentation with language education planning. Presenting data from a five year ethnographic study combined with a 40 year span of policy analysis, this volume is a rare book length treatment of the chasm between imagined policy and its experienced delivery, and will provide insights that policymakers around the world can draw on.

Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, this book explores language planning, language education, and language policy for diverse Native American peoples across time, space, and place. Based on long-term collaborative and ethnographic work with Native American communities and schools, the book examines the imposition of colonial language policies against the fluorescence of contemporary community-driven efforts to revitalize threatened mother tongues. Here, readers will meet those who are on the frontlines of Native American language revitalization every day. As their efforts show, even languages whose last native speaker is gone can be reclaimed through family-, community-, and school-based language planning. Offering a critical-theory view of language policy, and emphasizing Indigenous sovereignties and the perspectives of revitalizers themselves, the book shows how language regenesis is undertaken in social practice, the role of youth in language reclamation, the challenges posed by dominant language policies, and the prospects for Indigenous language and culture continuance current revitalization efforts hold.

This revised second edition is a comprehensive overview of why we speak the languages that we do. It covers language learning imposed by political and economic agendas as well as language choices entered into willingly for reasons of social mobility, economic advantage and group identity.

This volume investigates the policy and practice of medium of instruction at different levels of education in Asian polities including Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Maldives, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Vietnam. The chapters provide an informed understanding of the context, process, actors, goals and outcomes of medium of instruction policies from a language policy and planning perspective. The volume has an emphasis on the exploration of medium of instruction in action which brings into focus the perspectives of micro policy enactors including teachers, students, and parents in the local context, generating crucial empirical insights. This critical analysis of the goals, outcomes and experiences of this trend in global language-in-education will be of interest to language and education students, researchers, practicing teachers, executives in academia and language studies and to education policymaking authorities in Asia and other parts of the world. The volume updates existing research on medium of instruction and takes the field forward in a fast-changing world as English medium instruction policies are globalised. This book was originally published as a special issue of Current Issues in Language Planning.

Language Planning from Practice to Theory examines and reviews the field of language policy and planning. In the first section of the book language policy and planning definitions, current practices, goals and ways of thinking are discussed as a foundation for understanding current practice in the discipline. The central elements of language policy and planning practice are then described from two perspectives. In the second section, the methodology for collecting language planning data is outlined and the key cross-societal issues of language-in-education planning, literacy and economics in language planning are discussed. In the third section, case studies related to language and power, bilingualism and status and specific purpose issues in language planning are covered. The final two chapters draw together the critical issues and problems which have arisen from current practice and which must be considered in building a theory of the discipline. A reference appendix to language planning in national situations is included. The book provides the only up-to-date overview and review of the field of language policy and planning and challenges language planners to think more critically about their discipline. Since language will be planned, there is a need to consider how it will be done.

Language problems potentially exist at all levels of human activity, including he local contaxts of communities & institutions. This volume explores the ways in which language planning works as a local activity in a wide variety of contexts around the world & deals with a wide range of language planning issues.

Includes papers on Aboriginal language planning, Aboriginal bilingual education and language and education in the Torres Strait separately annotated.

This text covers the language situation in Hungary, Finland, and Sweden explaining linguistic diversity, historical and political contexts, including language-in-education planning; and the roles of the media, of religion, and of minority and migrant languages. The authors have been participants in the language planning context in these polities.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches – theoretical and empirical – supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines – anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.