Moving beyond Asocial Minority-Language Policy

This paper exams how asocial symbolic minority-language policy contributes to the social processes of language shift from the perspective of highly threatened languages, such as Scottish Gaelic. In introducing the concept of language shift through Asocial Minority-Language Policy, we argue that symbolic minority-language policy is detrimental to threatened language minorities in that it is ideologically implicated in language shift when it neglects the societal circumstances of minority-language decline. The prioritisation of the symbolic aspect of language policy also hinders a value-for-money approach to official provision for the minority group. This paper calls for a materialist/functionalist approach to minority-language societal regeneration to counter the social irrelevance of symbolic policy. We suggest policy options for moving beyond the symbolic focus on the minority-language condition.

Minority language policy and bilingual name semiotic landscape in Slovakia

The present paper addresses the issue of the interrelatedness of Slovakia’s minority language policy and the bilingual name semiotic landscape; more specifically, the name semiotic landscape of settlements populated by Slovakia Hungarians and the way Slovakia’s laws regulating name use affect visual proper noun use in the country. The name semiotic landscape constitutes an integral part of the linguistic landscape, comprising proper nouns and extralinguistic signs referring to, or accompanying names in name plates, signage in public spaces, and on various other surfaces. The name semiotic landscape is a component, an aspect, and a consequence of language policy and name policy. The way minority proper nouns can be displayed in public spaces is regulated by laws approved by the state. Some areas (such as personal name plates, business cards, and names of private institutions) are unregulated, and the forms of proper nouns can be chosen freely. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: to what extent are minority language rights implemented in visual name use in settlements populated by Slovakia Hungarians, whether Hungarian name usage is spreading, and to what extent do signage and name plates contain proper nouns in a Hungarian form. In bilingual societies, proper nouns and other signs in the minority language increase the prestige of the minority language and have the function of marking ethnic identity. In this paper, the proper noun semiotic, place name semiotic, and institution name semiotic landscapes are investigated for various proper noun types in Slovakia Hungarian settlements.

Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language practices under the influence of external interventions: A management perspective

This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language practices under the influence of external interventions from a language management perspective. It focuses on the ways the students engage with various levels of interventions in their language practices. The study mainly draws on a group of college-age minority students’ experiences and perspectives collected through semistructured interviews. Findings suggest that the students, in making decisions to use their ethnic language and Vietnamese, the mainstream language, responded to interventions by the school and the ethnic community by adapting to the latter's language policy, while reinterpreting to conform to/deviate from interventions by other individuals such as their parents, their teachers, or their peers. In that process of managing their language practices, they reframed their identity in which both maintenance and transformation orientations were active. Implications related to minority language policy and language maintenance are then suggested. (Language management, individual language management, language practices, language choice, language policy, language maintenance, ethnic minority)*

Critical Mass and Insecurity in Minority Language Policy

This article will discuss the extent to which legislation is effective in terms of changing individual and group behaviours. The specific focus of this article will be to argue that legislation pertaining to the use of the Welsh language in Wales, despite having expanded the domains of language use in an important way, has not shifted the cycle of language non-use that may be identified.

Testing the Spaces of Discretion: School Personnel as Implementers of Minority-Language Policy in China

Following international trends to reform school management, the Chinese government has proposed school-based decisionmaking as a measure to raise the “quality” of education, but at the same time it has imposed new institutions of accountability for teachers and school administrators. In order to understand how this interplay between accountability and discretion affects Chinese educational reforms, this paper analyses policy implementation through the lens of decision-making by principals and teachers as street-level bureaucrats. In the case of minority-language education in Xishuangbanna, a subject where institutions provide comparatively large spaces for discretionary decisions, I argue that the current institutions on accountability in minority-language education in China trigger processes by which implementers must interpret vague institutions in order to make decisions for their classroom. These purposefully wide spaces of “interpretational discretion” enable the party-state to make good on its promise to support local diversity, without threatening its own authority to prescribe educational goals.