It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

Chapter 30 investigates how Korean language education in the Republic of Korea (ROK) has influenced national development. The chapter argues that Korean language education in the ROK has directly and indirectly contributed to the establishment of national linguistic legitimacy. Reminding citizens of their personal and national identity, the notion of identity is associated with patriotism. Morality translates into moralism as it promotes the ethicality of individuals and the state. The chapter reviews developments such as the Hang?l writing revolution associated with King Sejong in the fifteenth century, the stylistic revolution associated the Korean language promotion movement led by Sigyeong Ju and the Chos?n Language Society, and the educational revolution in South Korea.

This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research, and in education. It begins with an overview of HLs in Canada and the current ethnolinguistic vitality (demographics, institutional support, and status) of these language varieties. This includes an overview of programs to teach HLs (or to use HLs as the medium of instruction) in primary, secondary, and post-secondary contexts. Census information is provided to profile the distribution of HL speakers across major cities and all the provinces and territories of Canada, and the status of the HLs. The next section surveys publications about HLs in Canada including overviews, studies from the domain of sociolinguistics (language variation and change) that rely on spontaneous speech corpora, acquisition studies employing experimental methodology, and research on pedagogical approaches, noting primary findings from each. Specific information is provided about heritage varieties of Cantonese, German, Greek, Italian, Inuktitut, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.

Adolescents use the language of peers as models for dialect acquisition in ways that sometimes diverge from their family or home variety, often leading to broad heterogeneity and unpredictability during adolescence and early adulthood. Participants in Grade 6, 8, and 10 were paired with a same-sex peer partner and interviewed in dyads. In this chapter, using an analytical model based on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), we establish participants’ convergence to or divergence from the peer partner. The study analyzes these accommodation patterns in adolescent African American dyads through the use of the scores from the Dialect Density Measure (DDM) composite index and an analysis for assessing relative similarity within dyads for large dyadic samples. The results reveal that samples exhibiting high and significant intra-class correlations (ICC) indicate more accommodation in terms of the DDM than those with low, non-significant ICCs. The study uncovers important gender differences in accommodative patterns intersecting with grade level as well as a role for ethnic identity. Ethnically salient features are employed as resources for accommodation for both girls and boys, but in different ways.