A compilation of papers taken from the Fourth International Conference on Minority Languages. While the first volume focused on the more theoretically orientated papers, this volume emphasizes the inventorial or descriptive approach.

Brussels has become the “capital” of Europe, serving as the headquarters for key regional and international agencies, including the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, UN organizations, multinational businesses, lobbying firms, governmental groups, and nongovernmental organizations. Its status as a diplomatic, political, and economic center assumes ever greater importance as the EU grows in depth and breadth. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Brussels covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 900 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Brussels.

CHRISTINA BRAIT PAULSTON There is an important difference between merely experimental and genuine experiment. The one may be a feeling for novelty, the other is rationally based on experience seeking a better way. - Frank Lloyd Wright Wright was talking about architecture, but the same difference can be applied to analyzing the relationship between standard and vernacular languages in bilingual education; surely we are also seeking a better way to handle bilingual education based on experience. How rationally based our efforts are, is another question. Works on this and similar topics can at times become the scene for very emotional-and very moving-presentations which sometimes are more utopian than rational. One can perhaps call this a very 'rational' text, because so few of the contributors are members of ethnic subordinate groups. Am I suggesting that minority group members are less rational? Of course not. I am suggesting that it is much easier to be calm, objective and scholarly about the lot of others than about your own. The most salient feature about the bilingual education of vernacular speaking groups is the social and economic exploitation of its members by the dominant group. The papers herein, treating bilingual education from a psychological perspective, agree at least on the issue that an understanding of the social and economic factors underlying bilingual education is crucial for understanding the psychological studies on bilingualism.

Linguistic Minorities, Policies and Pluralism examines the position of some linguistic minority groups, including policies that affect them. This book provides a useful perspective on group relations, emphasizing the aims, purposes, and values held by the societies in which linguistic minority groups exist. The structure of society and perceptions of pluralism and assimilation are also described. This text demonstrates that there is not a simple opposition between pluralism and assimilation, there are difficulties with educational programs intended to support minority group language and identity, minority views are not themselves homogeneous, and advocates of cultural pluralism often hold over-simplified and unrealistic ideas. This publication is a good reference for students and researchers conducting work on pluralism, assimilation, language maintenance/shift, and ethnolinguistic identity.

This edited collection examines the role that language has played in forming modern European nations. With language an omnipresent issue within the European Union, the importance languages have played within the histories and present situations of member nations is a crucial topic. Drawing on an international cast of contributors, the book explores the issues of monolingualism vs. plurilingualism within individual nations, the revival of languages in nations such as former soviet republics, and concludes with a look at language in the electronic age.

Written by scholars and professionals from such organizations as the Council of Europe and the European Community, this volume provides a comprehensive examination of education throughout Europe. The particularities of national educational systems are of necessity within its purview, but overall organization of the volume reflects such thematic and regional concerns as the impact of social and economic integration on education, the modification of educational structures and curricula following the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, degree equivalency, the financing of educational change, privatization, the impact of migration and immigration, national concerns, intercultural education, and multiculturalism. The volume's experts discuss European education's common heritage and the distinct national traditions it preserves. They deal with the interpretations of European education systems put forward in the shape of educational theories or reform-oriented programs, policies, and ideologies, as well as with the social actors, forces, and movements that have fuelled reform. The book's chapters also address the challenges European education has to face as a consequence of processes of change occurring at multiple levels: at the levels of cultural values, socio-political reconstruction, intercultural migration, supra-national integration, and ongoing global interconnection.