China is one of the most multilingual countries in the world. The government of the People’s Republic of China promotes the country as a harmonious and unified nation with 56 distinct ethnic groups who speak more than 400 heritage languages. The government has not only legally recognized multilingualism but also publicly encouraged a climate where the teaching and learning of a variety of heritage languages can flourish. This chapter provides insights into our understanding of Chinese language policy and implementation and heritage language maintenance and is based on empirical research and case studies in China’s multilingual regions and provinces. It examines the application of the Chinese government’s language policy and heritage language practices over the last 30 years with its underlying language ideology and practices, revealing de facto language policies. While modern standard Chinese (Putonghua) continues to be a powerful factor in both consolidating and probing educational, cultural, social, and political discourse as well as the spatial environment, Xi Jinping’s recent “One Belt and One Road” project has created a new linguistic environment, which has affected the use of heritage languages within diverse minority groups. This has accelerated the deep concern shared among those advocating heritage language maintenance in China.

This chapter presents an overview of Spanish as a heritage language, using the framework of Capacity, Opportunity, Desire, to assess the vitality of US Spanish. Special attention is given to the state of Spanish-language education and its role in supporting vitality. Outlining two major directions for future pedagogical work, this chapter explores how the findings of heritage linguistics and the constructs of superdiversity and linguistic contact zones can strengthen the teaching of Spanish to heritage language learners.

In this chapter, we review how economists and linguists have problematized the relationship between economy and language, focusing on their methodologies, theoretical toolboxes, and ideologies. One of the striking differences lies in the ways they conceptualize languages, viz., as strictly denotational for economists but both denotational and indexical for linguists. We show that by approaching them as abstract, asocial, ahistorical, and statistically measurable entities, economists treat languages as resources whose economic consequences for individuals or societies can simply be derived from their intrinsic nature. By contrast, examining languages as practices grounded in their sociohistorical ecologies, linguists have been more interested in the valuation of some languages as capitals that can outweigh others economically or symbolically. Overall, we highlight the interdisciplinary nature of “economy and language” as a research area, showing how complex it is and how productive it should be to build an intellectual bridge between the two disciplines.