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.

The author’s reflection takes off from Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other or, the Prosthesis of Origin. The chapter proceeds by assessing the hesitant answer given by Barbara Cassin in response to a question from the audience (can we ever learn a second language to the level of our first?) at the end of a lecture entitled ‘More Than One Language’. Her answer is negative on the whole, and she evokes Hannah Arendt’s attachment to her native German. From these two points of departure the chapter seeks to give an account of what we mean by a ‘Mother tongue’, starting with a diachronic account. The Mother tongue isn’t a unitary entity; its construction is the result of a continued process of linguistic interpellation of the speaker; it is therefore the product not so much of an individual as of a social relation. Two detours, through Lucien Sève’s Marxist anthropology and the ‘tetraglossic’ theory of Henri Gobard, help account for this individual-cum-social construction of a speaking subject. The acquisition of a second Mother tongue can then be envisaged, a process that duplicates the acquisition of the original Mother tongue, thus giving a positive answer to the question addressed to Cassin.

In this chapter, which takes a psychoanalytical approach, the author references Jean-Paul Hiltenbrand’s work on untranslatability in situations of migration and bilingualism, and presents the case history of a thirteen-year-old adolescent who is the third daughter of a Korean mother and a French father. Silent and depressed, Ohé was brought for counselling by her mother, who learned French at university on arriving in Paris, where she settled as a young woman. When she became a mother, she chose to speak to her daughters only in French. The therapy sessions focus increasingly on the analyst’s intuition that something is lacking in the adolescent’s Mother tongue, leading to the hypothesis that the daughter’s difficulties might be related to the mother’s dilemma of untranslatability in certain crucial areas of experience. This is related to the adolescent’s passion for Japanese cartoons. To Ohé, it seems, Japanese has come to represent a kind of halfway house in which the maternal dimension can be found between the second Mother tongue and the first (albeit missing) Mother tongue.

A writer, film director, photographer, and artist, the author’s reflection comprises the opening pages of an essay and an autobiographical fragment presenting his mixed-origin multilingual family. The short final section, ‘Border Tax’, extracted from the same essay, reflects on power relations strategies and the high economic and political stakes of multilingual verbal interaction. The economic metaphor of a border tax to convey the idea that an accent is the price to be paid for speaking a foreign language is striking as a reminder of the hybrid character of language: linguistic transparency and purity, and sharply delimited bilingualism, are delusions. Accents are described as markers of belonging; they are shown to convey fine nuances of identity, to carry with them distant or lost worlds. In contrast with the usual perception of accent as something to be erased, the author prizes accent as a remnant of the past in the present, or of far-off places in the here and now. The price to be paid to speak a second language well can be a high one, and our sights should not be set too high for our students, as we cannot know how high the price will be for them.

This chapter draws on the conceptual framework of attachment theory and the bodily imprint on the psyche, as elaborated by John Bowlby, among other psychoanalytical references, and on examples taken from French- or English-language writers such as Louis Wolfson. It focuses on the language learning process in early childhood and its repercussions later in life in second language learning. It is rooted in the author’s experience as professor of English at Aix-Marseille University and her lifelong interest in psychoanalysis, supplemented by a research experiment in a children’s clinic during which she attended psychiatric consultations with small children suffering from speech impediments, and their parents. In this chapter, she provides an account of the hybrid nature of the Mother tongue, analyses the social and linguistic tensions experienced by children caught between the ‘interior’ languages (the Mother tongue is already divided) of their family circle and the ‘exterior’ language spoken at school ‘beyond the bounds of the mother’. When these experiences produce trauma, their reactivation in adulthood by the attempt to speak a foreign language can prove an inhibiting force.

‘The Sea of Language’ is the first chapter of Volume 1 of a two-volume work entitled Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande (When Freud Sees the Sea: Freud and the German Language). The author, as writer and translator, explores how the founding tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis are not concepts that happen to have been framed in German, but were derived from the way German parts of speech are rooted in the body and thus grounded in the German language itself, which is not a language of abstraction, as French admirers of German philosophy tend to believe, but of the body in space and in motion, a language of the common people going about their everyday life. The author’s study of the essence of German takes him from poetry to philosophy to the ‘ultimate perversity’: the language of the Third Reich, which he briefly envisages as a return of the repressed within the German language, possibly intuited by Freud. Through his analysis of German, he illustrates how the character of a language can lend itself to perverse manipulation and how individuals can find themselves rejected by the Mother tongue that had so far nurtured them.

The introduction sets out the dual purpose of the book: to present the editors’ research on the residual presence of the Mother tongue in second language learning, and to showcase a selection of essays by Francophone authors whose thinking on the Mother tongue has influenced their own. They wish to introduce the concept of the langue mat-rangère, or ‘(M)other tongue’. This term conveys the way the second language comprises an in-matrie dimension that underlies speech in a foreign language. By presenting the foreign language as an act involving the body, they highlight the place that should be given to the mother tongue in second language learning. Thanks to the multidisciplinary creative pedagogy they promote, the forgotten or repressed mother tongue finds its place again, making it easier to learn the foreign language. Two second language learning situations are described: the foreign language started at school, usually at about eleven years old, and the second language that is grafted onto the original language in a context such as migration. Both situations reveal a common denominator between them: the central role played in second language learning by the original Mother tongue, in its most archaically emotional, sensory, and bodily dimension.

The chapter focuses on a persistent problem within nationalist ideology, as it emerged in Jacob Grimm’s reflections on the rise of mandatory schooling. School systems can impose a uniform language across a large territory, effectively giving shape to a national people. This became increasingly clear to Grimm as he witnessed the emergence of a veritable army of schoolteachers around the mid-nineteenth century. While he approved of greater national unification by means of mass schooling, the fact of public education also forced him to consider that the nation may not grow from below to delimit the proper reach of a state. Instead, an existing state apparatus could forge a more standardized culture by institutional means, at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language and customs within families. Hence the state may not need a philologist to trace national boundaries. Indeed, the school system itself, a necessary institution in the developed modern state, threatened local cultures with extinction and hence deprived populations of the cultural memory that Grimm had pledged to protect as a scholar.

This chapter discusses global challenges in English language teaching and teacher education and the local responses in the Philippines. It outlines the issues posed by globalization from two perspectives: (1) globalization as an "economic imperative" and (2) "critical resistance" against globalization as marginalizing local economic initiatives. It discusses the government’s responses to these issues, motivated by the need for the Philippines to be globally competitive, especially as part of a community of nations in the ASEAN. This chapter also discusses critical issues arising from the local responses to the challenges of globalization, which impact on English language teaching and teacher education in the Philippines: the competing proposals for the medium of instruction, the mixed attitudes toward English, the changing standards of English, and the expanding role of the English language teacher. Finally, it outlines important insights have been gained from these discussions that may inform policy making and professional practice.

This chapter argues that disciplining of bilingual education as a scholarly field served to divorce discussions of bilingual education from broader political and economic struggles in favor of the seemingly objective pursuit of the benefits of bilingual education. This disciplining of bilingual education was part of a larger discursive shift that reframed discussions of racial inequality from a focus on unequal access and the need for structural change to a focus on the deficiencies of racialized communities and the need for modifying these deficiencies. The chapter ends with a call for bilingual education scholars to situate issues of language inequality within the broader white supremacist and capitalist relations of power. This will offer bilingual education scholars tools for rejecting deficit perspectives of language-minoritized children and pointing to the broader racial stratification that makes these deficit perspectives possible to begin with.

Since their widespread adoption in the nineteenth century, censuses have played both bureaucratic and ideological roles, as the classification of the population according to social and cultural characteristics facilitated the development of the administrative infrastructure required by emergent nation-states and the definition of national and group identity categories officialized particular ways of understanding difference. This chapter critically analyzes the questions about language asked by Statistics Canada and the US Census Bureau. I examine the relationship of language data to various policies in the two countries, as well as the ways that those policies, and specific ways of asking about language, reflect and reproduce particular ideologies of language. In addition to revealing differing perspectives on individual and societal multilingualism, this analysis demonstrates that census language statistics do not simply serve as "facts" undergirding policy, but instead produce particular representations of linguistic diversity and, thus, constitute official discourses on multilingualism.