‘Language policy’ is a highly diverse term, encompassing all attempts to purposefully influence language use. Government language policy is broadly considered to have originated as a distinct field of research and policymaking in the 1970s, but we begin the chapter with a historical review of its precursors dating back several centuries. We trace the roots of contemporary language policy to two broad historical developments: Bible translation and universal education. These laid the foundations for what would become language policy. In the contemporary language policy period, we divide our discussion across three fields: modern foreign languages (MFL), indigenous languages and community languages. These categorisations come from policy, not linguistics or sociology. These groups of languages are treated differently in policy, so we divide them accordingly and trace their origins and developments in three political eras from the 1970s onwards: neoliberalism (1970s–80s), New Public Management (1990s–2000s), and austerity (2008 onwards). We show how each field of language policy has been indelibly shaped and contoured by changing political conditions and priorities. Lastly, we consider forms of language that tend to fall outside the scope of government policy, and what extra this reveals about language policy.

After many years during which indigenous laws were mostly absent from narratives of Latin American law, presently, legal historians wish to integrate them. However, to do so requires answering the question of what we know about indigenous laws and how we can approach them. Writing the history of indigenous laws from precolonial times is especially challenging not only because of the diversity of human groups that occupied the continent, but also because of the disparity of available sources, ranging from material vestiges and pictographic documents to texts produced in indigenous writing systems. Furthermore, the colonial period has left us with a wide range of alphabetic texts, diverse in authorship, languages, formats, degree of accuracy, and sources selected, that describe precolonial law. Indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Spaniards also wrote historical narratives and accounts of deeds and services; furthermore, they participated as litigants in lawsuits in which they expressed their vision of law and justice. What does this evidence tell us about precolonial normative orders and the way in which they intersected with colonial law after the Iberian imperial conquests? To answer this question, this chapter proposes an interdisciplinary approach, surveying what has been done, and what could still be done.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

The dominance of research into multilingualism and multilingual education produces a privileging of work within urban settings. The multilingual city; the superdiversity of urban wards; the institutions of language learning – the libraries; the cinemas; community language schools; cafés for language conversation; ethnically diverse restaurants, shops and take-aways where languages proliferate and live – all produce particular urban language ecologies. Policy is largely framed for languages according to needs of urban settings and rural multilingualisms are framed as ‘indigenous’, or of ‘the margins’. By tracing genealogies of language learning in and for rural settings and for research outside of urban environments the chapter deconstructs ways in which multilingualisms serve dominant policies, especially of colonial powers. Taking case studies from AHRC Large Grant Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law and the State, the chapter considers the dimension of rurality in working towards equity and parity in language positions, and the way that arts and indigenous knowledges might serve a decolonizing agenda as it receives renewed critical attention.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) aims to help learners meet “present and future real-world communicative needs” (Long, 2015: 68). In Indigenous language revitalisation contexts, however, there may not be a real-world need to speak the target language, due to a lack of speakers or the widespread bilingualism associated with particular stages of language loss. Drawing on two distinct but complementary contexts, Macuiltianguis Zapotec after-school lessons (Oaxaca, Mexico) and a workshop for teachers at a Salish Qlispe immersion school (Montana, United States), we show how TBLT might be adapted for language revitalisation through the conscious creation of new spaces for meaningful communication in the target language. The Zapotec and Salish contexts represent different approaches to adapting TBLT for Indigenous language instruction. The Zapotec teachers looked for everyday communicative tasks that learners plausibly could do in Zapotec, focusing on encouraging students to speak Zapotec in situations in which they were already interacting with Zapotec speakers in the community but doing so in Spanish. The Salish teachers, on the other hand, focused on the school itself as a new space for meaningful language use. We describe how task-based methodological principles (Long, 2009, 2015) were useful for planning and teaching in these settings.

While some heritage languages enjoy large numbers of speakers and vibrant communities, centuries-old and ongoing sociohistorical and sociolinguistic oppression has resulted in the extreme endangerment of many Indigenous languages. To counter this linguistic and cultural loss, a growing number of communities have engaged in language revitalization efforts that are tied to broader objectives of ethnic reclamation and cultural resistance, aiming not only to maintain but also to strengthen what has been lost. Heritage language revitalization is a long-term project that demands change and engagement across many aspects of community life, work that is ripe with tensions and contradictions. This chapter considers three recurrent questions in heritage language revitalization: what efforts should be prioritized in language revitalization, who should take responsibility in revitalizing a language, and how should revitalization efforts navigate the perceived need to establish linguistic norms and standards while concomitantly supporting linguistic diversity. To date, these questions have been described as tensions or problems that reveal conflicting priorities, often the result of historical inequalities, and that frequently hinder language revitalization efforts. Rather than framing these questions as problems, the present chapter considers how communities have responded to these challenges to create new opportunities for collaboration and new approaches that embrace ambiguity and pluralism.

A significant proportion of the threatened idioms of the world are small, pre-literate languages spoken by communities encapsulated within modern ‘developed’ countries (e.g. Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand) whose dominant population uses a European competitor language of great prestige and wide currency. This acute asymmetry has been referred to by some Canadian indigenous leaders as characterizing the ‘Fourth World’ languages. Growing concern about the future of these languages has led to a focus on developing indigenous language literacy to prevent or even to reverse their loss. Focusing on the ‘standardization’ of the Innu language spoken in Quebec (Canada), this case study addresses the issue of whether standardization can actually foster literacy in the indigenous language and curtail (or even reverse) shift to the dominant language. The chapter discusses the process of orthographic standardization among the Innus as it unfolded in the past fifty years. It compares it with similar contexts across the world. A growing consensus emerges that standardization and literacy skills in indigenous languages cannot prevent language loss, and it is doubtful that it can foster the revitalization of the receding language.

Chapter 9 will consider the role of English as a language of education across the region, including brief reviews of its role in primary, secondary and higher education in selected settings. It will review and critically consider language education policies that have been adopted in a range of Asian countries. The second half of the chapter will turn to a review and critical discussion of the increasing use of English as the medium of instruction in higher education across universities in the region. The chapter will conclude by arguing that language education policies need to be considered holistically and be coherent from primary to tertiary education. Otherwise there is a danger of English replacing local languages as languages of education and scholarship.

In post-independent Africa, social transformation interweaves with other ideological goals such as African renaissance, decolonisation, indigenisation and black empowerment together with ideals for good governance, democracy, social and racial harmony, economic prosperity and political sovereignty, the goal of transformation. The postcolonial order is characterised by economic deterioration, political upheavals, poverty, dictatorship, civil strife, intra- and inter-territorial wars and tribal and racial distrust. These problems are increasing despite attempts to have them solved. Drawing from regional experiences, the chapter advances that using indigenous languages is among the best practices to ensure successful societal transformation. It examines the role that indigenous languages play in guaranteeing the participation of the masses, and in the development of indigenous languages to function in productive sectors of society. It argues that social transformation requires a comprehensive action programme to rid indigenous languages of technical challenges and recommends the use of digital language resources and human language technology among other necessary human, institutional and legal interventions.

The chapter provides an overview of the ways in which English has existed within a framework of multilingualism in all countries where it is spoken. The first part considers English beyond the shores of Britain, where it was initially introduced to contexts in which indigenous populations and their languages already existed, such as America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Later, as English was introduced to countries in Africa and Asia that were colonized by the British, such as Nigeria and India, it added to the multilingual patterns that already existed in those places. English has continued to rise in importance in countries that have no links to a colonial history or where it has no official function; this is often linked to processes of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In these countries, English is often part of an individual’s multilingual repertoire. The chapter finally returns to Britain, where the myth of English monolingualism probably persists the most. Both historical and modern-day multilingualism are discussed and a case study is presented to demonstrate how multilingualism has impacted on the English variety spoken in London today.