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The principles that underlie official bilingualism are viewed broadly with the objective of making sense of the interplay between citizenship in the Canadian polity and its embodiment in federal (and where relevant, provincial) language policy. Section 1 of the chapter gives an historical overview of events that have relevance to the development of official bilingualism construed as a civic commitment. Section 2 discusses three strands of citizenship that are involved in justifications (and criticisms) of language rights for French‐ and English‐speaking Canadians. Section 3 examines the degree to which some of these justifications can reflect moral ties between citizens and Section 4 looks at the current state of these ties.

Code‐centric accounts of bilingualism obscure the processes whereby bilingual utterances acquire social significance by viewing them simply as admixtures of pre‐existing grammatical codes. This chapter proposes an alternative account: (1) Bilingual speakers produce speech tokens of varying degrees of fidelity to grammatical types (in matrix or source language) and, conversely, of varying degrees of type‐hybridity (blending category types across languages); and (2) speakers tend reflexively to re‐analyze degrees of fractional fit (of form tokens to types) as register contrasts among “social types” (types of person speaking, of activity or conduct performed through speech). Bilingual interaction thereby imposes a social‐characterological logic of register evaluation upon a logic of grammatical variation, producing contrastive models of person and activity type, some among which remain relevant only to the current interaction, while others become widely known (to bilinguals, or to monolinguals in one or the other language community) through forms of institutional dissemination.

This chapter is an examination of the personal side of language maintenance and language shift in the United States, as told by Asian‐Americans from immigrant families. Pertinent selections were taken for over 250 “language autobiographies” submitted over several years in a course at the University of California at Berkeley. In these autobiographies, the students reveal their struggles with learning English and the concomitant decline of their heritage tongue. They describe from a personal point of view the processes of language attrition and the embarrassments, intergenerational isolation and ultimate regrets coming from their own illiteracy, incomplete learning and attrition of their family's native language. The conclusion points out the waste of heritage languages which, if supported better in the school system, could be important resources for the United States.

Latin is only one among many languages that have established themselves, in written form, by translating from others. The negative impact that humanism as promoted by Petrarch made on what is called the ‘inclusiveness’ of medieval Latin is shown. The relation between bilingualism and translation is obviously intricate. The separate source of the anecdote emerges quite clearly in the language. The chapter also shows the three factors in the story of Latin: (a) native developments in the language, (b) Hellenisms that infiltrated into it, and (c) outright translationese, idioms remaining recognizably foreign. It is suggested that, as the development of Latin in all its forms is understood from antiquity down to the Renaissance, it could be useful to pay more attention to the role of translations from Greek; not as a category apart, but as a continuing process, constantly provoking or instilling redefinition of what is possible as written Latin, or indeed as Kunstprosa.

This chapter presents an in-depth linguistic evaluation of a corpus of messages posted in several bilingual newsgroups in Catalonia (Spain). The social context is a situation of bilingualism and language contact where Spanish seems to be progressively overtaking Catalan as the language of daily use. The decline of Catalan might be prevented by integrating online machine translation (MT) into newsgroups, so that Catalan speakers do not feel the need or pressure to shift to using Spanish. Therefore, the main goal of this chapter is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the email register, in order to assess the implications for the implementation of online machine translation environments. The chapter reports to what extent different types of linguistic mistakes or deviations from the norm threaten the feasibility of online automatic translation, and offers some suggestions how to overcome the limitations of MT systems in processing “noisy” CMC input.

There has been a good deal of concern around the world about the disproportionate role of English on the Internet and thus a possible displacement of other languages. Yet little prior research has investigated the relationship between use of English and other languages online. This chapter combines linguistic analysis, a survey, and interviews to examine English and Arabic language use in online communication by a group of young professionals in Egypt. The study indicates that among this group, English is used predominantly in World Wide Web browsing and formal email communication, but that a romanized version of Egyptian Arabic is used extensively in informal email messages and online chats. This online use of English and Arabic is analyzed in relation to broader social trends of language, technology, globalization, and identity.

Migration groups and diasporic communities are important contemporary sites for bi- and multilingual discourse on the Internet, which this chapter explores, taking discussion forums of German-based migrant groups as a case in point. German and home languages (such as Greek, Persian, and Indian languages) are both used on these forums, albeit in proportions depending on the participants, topics, and interaction contexts. Quantitative language choice analysis of a popular Persian discussion forum suggests that the assumed relationship between home-language preference and home-culture topics holds true on a general level, but is challenged by fine-grained analysis of language choice within single threads. Sequential analysis of code-switching on Persian and Greek discussion forums suggests that typical patterns of discourse-functional code-switching are common on these forums. Methodologically, this chapter outlines a unified approach to the study of multilingual computer-mediated discourse, suggesting how to complement qualitative code-switching with quantitative language choice analysis.

This chapter presents a bilingual version of dual coding theory. It reviews the implications of the theory for some current issues in the psychology of bilingualism, including semantic memory, episodic memory, second language learning. The theory leads to a strong emphasis on the role of situational contexts and imagery in second language learning. In particular, the theory suggests that language-learning strategies based on the systematic use of referent objects, pictures, activities, and mental imagery would be especially effective in promoting learning.

For many 19th- and 20th-century theorists and activists, language was crucial to nationalism. Scholars suggest that the linguistic effects of the Norman conquest constituted an important though temporary blow to English identity, and that survival of English was important for survival of Englishness. This chapter argues that whatever connection there was between the English language and English identity, it was fairly weak. The discernible influence of Old English literature after the middle of the 12th century is also negligible. However, it contends that bilingualism was also very important in facilitating the process of cultural assimilation. In particular, England fairly quickly developed into a bilingual society, at least in towns, the aristocracy, and perhaps among the middling sort.

A series of ethnographies of French-language minority schools in Ontario, a largely anglophone province, shows how French Canadians cut adrift by Québécois nationalism sought nonetheless to emulate the Quebec model by fighting for institutions, especially schools, as quasi-territorial homogeneous ethnonational spaces. This ideology comes into conflict with the multilingualism of the experience of participants in the school space and with the growing importance of French-English bilingualism in the labor market, that is, its emergence as a valued commodity.

Assia Djebar's contribution to the assessment of Algeria as a multilingual space. Djebar's "writing for the trace" inscribes a dual resistance to colonial appropriations, but also to claims of authentic self-recovery after independence. Focusing on scenes of vanishing inscriptions or writing under erasure, Djebar presents an Algerian site that is produced poetically or in fragments.

This chapter sets out the history of the reception of Beckett’s How It Is and accounts for its relative neglect. The main lines of critical interpretation are identified and then challenged. The work’s particular hermeneutic problems are discussed in relation to different theoretical orientations (post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, historicist and materialist), before exploring the text’s own representation of the relationships between voice and writing, memory and archive.

Tying up to a postmodernist notion of identity as fragmented, incongruent, and constructed in the process of narrating (Pavlenko, 2006, pp. 13ff.), this chapter shows how Finnish-German research participants evaluate cultural and linguistic practices of the national spaces of Germany and Finland to construct conflicting bilingual and bicultural identities in a narrative interview. With the help of the analytical framework of Positioning Theory that takes the interactional embedding of the recounted narratives into account, the analysis demonstrates that the constructed identities grow out of the interview talk and are multiple on different interactional levels. On a vertical level, tellers orient both to the local interactional requirements of the interview and to broader discourses of (Finnish-German) bilingualism and biculturalism in the same moment in time. On a horizontal level they make national space relevant in different moments in time and thereby construct partly incommensurate bilingual and bicultural identities.