This chapter first discusses to what extent we can find attitudes in historical contexts. Whereas explicit attitudes can be culled from metalinguistic texts, implicit attitudes may be reconstructed on the basis of variation in language use, for example, in the use of pronouns versus full noun phrases. Such discursive patterns are signs of indexicality, which can be seen as the linguistic form of more intangible language ideologies. The chapter then introduces main concepts from language ideological theory, such as erasure and iconisation. Distinguishing between language myths and language ideologies, we discuss a range of examples, such as the myth of polite language and the standard language ideology. A number of case studies, including purism in the German metalinguistic tradition, linguistic debates about antiquity and ethnicity in Early Modern Spain, and the establishment of Luxembourgish as a national language, are used to further illustrate key concepts and approaches.

Different texts have different characteristics. In this chapter, we first explore the concepts of register, genre and style, which are, in the tradition of Biber, linked to communicative functions and situational characteristics. The co-occurrence of register features and dimensions are introduced as the linguistic indicators of communicative functions. A particularly useful approach to register centres around keyness, which we demonstrate with historical Portuguese data. We then introduce discourse traditions as a historical-linguistic concept closely related to genre and register. We use French literary examples to explain stylistic differences and the link with the Labovian distinction between indicators, markers and stereotypes. This leads to a discussion of indexicality and indexical fields more generally, for which we draw on ancient Greek plays. The chapter continues the discussion of the literary representation of language variation on the basis of English texts comprising dialect, and explains the important concept of enregisterment.

The English language is generally discussed publicly with reference to an ideologically constructed correct form. Such discourses first emerged in the eighteenth century forming part of a long process of language standardisation, a process associated with major political imperatives. Standard language ideologies, articulated and maintained by powerful social groups, vary in different nations. Distinctive British and American ideologies are associated with critical points in national histories, and have the effect of disadvantaging specific social groups by disparaging their language varieties. Rather than being dismissed as examples of ill-informed misunderstanding of the nature of language promoted by powerful speakers for their own purposes, such ideologies can be considered more broadly as part of a larger set of perspectives on language articulated by language users, intimately connected not only with vested social and political interests but with explaining connections between language and the social world or describing its structure systematically.

Despite the fact that bilingual instruction in the United States of America pre-dates its nationhood, educational policy has undulated its allowance and support for dual language education, marked by both selective preferential treatment of certain (primarily European) languages and through broad opposition to the endeavour as a whole. This brief review of the history and scholarship of dual language education in the USA recaps the ebbs and flows of bilingual education over time and the accompanying shifts in discourses about the purposes and benefits of bilingual education with subsequent implications for how bilingual education is implemented.

This chapter introduces the study of language ideologies and the relationship between language, social belonging, and social order, particularly in the context of late modernity. It approaches linguistic categories as discursively constructed rather than naturally occurring. This frames language as a key lens for understanding human social organisation, emphasising that ideas about language reflect and co-construct broader social and political ideologies. Through a discussion of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories, the chapter critiques essentialist views of language. It introduces concepts such as social indexicality, standard language, prestige, and centring institutions to explore how language acquires social meaning and status. The chapter also examines the material dimensions of language, including the role of writing, sound, and tangible artefacts such as grammars and dictionaries in shaping linguistic ideologies and language categories. It lays the foundations for understanding languages as dynamic, constructed phenomena embedded in specific historical, cultural, and material contexts.

This chapter focuses on the authors’ personal experience challenging some of the dominant language ideologies in Croatia’s public sphere. We first provide a brief overview of the language situation in Croatia with special emphasis on the prevailing conceptualizations of language(s) in the works of established language ideologues and authors of usage guides, found in popular language-focused television and radio programs as well. We then move on to classifying and addressing some of the positive and also negative (print, audio, online) reactions from the conservative linguistic circles and their ideologies and discourse strategies following the publication of our book Jeziku je svejedno [Language could care less, 2019, Zagreb: Sandorf], in which we carried out a detailed qualitative critical analysis of prescriptivist discourse in Croatia, most notably as found in contemporary usage guides. Finally, we outline some of our ideas for future activist work with the aim of deconstructing harmful language ideologies, empowering average speakers and reducing the level of linguistic insecurity and self-hatred.

This chapter reports on ethnographic research carried out in an EMI course in an Italian higher education institution. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the recent, contested growth of EMI in Italy and a critical analysis of national policy documents to unveil the ideological underpinnings of EMI in this sociocultural context. This is followed by the presentation and discussion of findings of ethnographic research carried out over three years in a course designed to promote critical language awareness in an EMI context. The study looks at how students’ ideologies of language interact with those identified at the macro and meso levels, first of all by exploring the language portraits and biographies of a class of students at the beginning of their English-Taught Programme. This is followed by a more in-depth analysis of the portraits and biographies of three students who were interviewed one year later. This provides a longitudinal dimension to the research and insights into the changing nature of language ideologies and also linguistic repertoires.

This chapter reviews the last twenty-five years of L2 prosody research in three sections, word stress, sentence intonation, and rhythm, and presents findings in relation to two underlying themes, form-meaning mapping and additive versus subtractive bilingual contexts. Concerning L2 stress, pioneering research framed perception difficulties either as an L1-to-L2 cue-transfer problem or as a processing deficit linked to learners’ inability to represent contrastive stress in their lexicons. Recent research established the extent and limits of those initial frames. L2 sentence intonation has multiple factors modeling its variation. One of them, social meaning, and in particular accommodation literature revealed the effect of affective factors which in multilingual communities became stronger than that of linguistic and social factors. As regards L2 rhythm, most research uses duration-based measures. Indeed, recent L1 studies started examining pitch-based rhythm measures which are still to be explored in L2. Ending with suggestions for future research that address those biases, this chapter aims at promoting a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of L2 prosody.

In 1960-80, (American) linguistic anthropology (e.g., Gumperz and Hymes , ) developed an empirical, ethnographic approach to (the details of) language (use), its social context, and variation across speakers and situations, affinities and differences. It overlapped with (Labovian) sociolinguistics — and was distinct from Chomsky’s formal, ‘universal’ approach. It defined, refined or created ‘units’ of analysis, e.g. speech community/community of practice; speech event (ethnography of communication, the SPEAKING mnemonic); everyday speech and interaction; verbal and non-verbal contextualization cues (interactional sociolinguistics); communicative habits of speakers (e.g., diglossia); indexes/indices connected to the context which help social identity formation. Thus, it defined language as a cultural practice and social resource and linked the details of performance with broader conditions of use.

In 1980-2000 interdisciplinary conversations led to new domains of inquiry: (1) language socialization: language acquisition and full participation in social groups by children and newcomers related to cultural norms, practices, attitudes; (2) language ideologies: ideas about social and linguistic relationships, linked to issues of power, politics, and economics; (3) verbal performance: creative and aesthetic uses of language and other forms of artistic expression.

Language is not a neutral medium of communication; it is embedded in social contexts and is a force that is socio-historically-politically determined.

This chapter examines the effects of various instructor individual differences (IDs) on their beliefs regarding the “ideal” L2 Spanish and their assessment of speech samples of different advanced oral proficiency sub-levels as determined by the ACTFL-OPI. It also answers the question of whether different language components are rated differently, and if such ratings match the evaluators’ ideologies. Quantitative data were collected from a survey distributed among N=77 members of academic institutions who occupied various professional roles around the world consisting of administrators, researchers, and practitioners. The survey examined constructs such as linguistic structure, sophisticated language use, and sociocultural appropriateness. Results show that instructor IDs affect beliefs regarding advanced language use, that they create bias in assessing it, and that consequently foreign-language departments need to educate its constituents about evolving definitions of advancedness, about the reality of individual biases in assessment, and that they need to provide the leadership to implement them in curricular design.

To explain Latinization of the Roman West, scholars have long searched for evidence of a language policy mandating the use of Latin. They have found none under the Principate. The Roman centre was not interested in policies involving all its subjects, and elite Romans were uninterested in languages other than Latin and Greek and had no concerns about their use, as long as the Empire’s functioning remained intact. Indeed, it is not clear that any such policy would have made much sense for provincials in illiterate and translingual environments. However, though there may not have been an Empire-wide policy of Latinization, there were certainly language ideologies and multiple narrowly focused facets of language management concerning the use of Latin and Greek in the running of the Empire.

This chapter addresses the shift from multilingualism to monolingualism associated with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a general overview of the linguistic conditions in the Ottoman lands, briefly surveying the historical dimensions of linguistic interactions reflecting the ebb and flow of Ottoman expansion and contraction, including the Westward movement of Turkic speakers into the central Islamicate lands and Anatolia from the eleventh century, the expansion of Ottoman rule into the Balkans from the fourteenth century, and the influx of Muslim refugees into the shrinking borders of the Empire as a result of military defeats and ethnic cleansing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter then focuses on three main factors affecting linguistic interactions in the Ottoman lands: (a) the inherently multilingual nature of Ottoman Turkish as an amalgam of three languages, namely, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; (b) the lived linguistic experience in the Empire, including the lack of a clear correlation between ethnicity, religion, and mother tongue, e.g., large numbers of Armenians, Turks, and Greeks, whose first language was not, respectively, Armenian, Turkish, or Greek, and; (c) the ways in which the advent of nationalism and Western influence affected the linguistic scene in such a diverse and demographically mixed Empire. The chapter ends by considering post-Ottoman language policies and the monolingual orientation of the modern nation-state. The tensions between the two are often revealed when signs of the multilingual past emerge to disturb the monolingual assumptions of the modern, read “national,” era.

This introduction has three aims: (a) to discuss the causes of historic amnesia in the field of multilingualism; (b) to offer a brief survey of historic language management, defined here as explicit efforts to regulate the choice of languages and scripts and to facilitate communication in the public domain; and (c) to reconsider the relationship between past and present multilingualism and identify productive directions for future inquiry. I begin by listing the misconceptions that raised my interest in the history of multilingual societies. Then, I will discuss the paradoxes and contradictions of historic language management in six institutional domains: administration, courts of law, religion, army, education, and public signage. In the last section, I consider the big picture emerging from recent historic work. The opposite of what we have come to believe, this picture undermines the sense of contemporary exceptionalism and opens up space for new narratives and exciting avenues of pursuit.

In an increasing number of families and communities, children grow up in multilingual and multicultural environments. Children thus negotiate their identities while navigating across linguistic practices and ideologies at home, in school, and in community spaces. This paper has two main aims. First, it develops a clearer understanding of developments in the research domain of plurilingualism, identity, childhood and education. Second, it provides insight into the nexus between children’s’ identity construction and larger societal discourses and practices. In the first part, the focus lies on the concept of identity itself and the way it relates to language(s), discourse(s) and societal language ideologies. In the second part, the focus is on some contexts that are especially relevant for the development of children’s linguistic identities and agency, such as family language policies, early childhood education in nurseries, language regimes and pedagogical traditions of language teaching in schools. The important role of educational institutions with regard to the lingua-cultural identity development of children and adolescents in a globalized world becomes more than evident.

The linguistic input parents provide to their children is crucial to the development of multilingualism. This chapter focuses on multilingualism in families where children either receive input in two or more home languages that are different from the environment language(s) or grow up in a bilingual community and have at least one additional home language. The chapter discusses quantity and quality of parental input as well as challenges in measurement. It reviews aspects of parental input, drawing upon Spolsky’s (2009) interrelated components of family language policy (FLP) – language ideologies, language management, and language practices. Parental attitudes, beliefs, and language ideologies impact on motivation and goal-setting in relation to the input they provide to their children. Language management is addressed through an examination of models of multilingual upbringing and parental input strategies. The implementation of FLP is reflected in actual language practices within the family. These are considered not only from the parental perspective but also from the children’s reactions to their parents’ input, as child agency plays a substantial role in the eventual success of parents’ strategies and practices.