This work presents selected papers of the millenial conferences of the Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems. Topics covered include interlingualism; English as a global language; the "business" of language endangerment; and maintaining linguodiversity.

ABSTRACT:Global language communication has always been a topic of great interest. How and why majority languages evolved is an intriguing topic that has evolved over the centuries. Evidence has been rapidly mounting that suggest that there are only a handful of spoken languages that receive more utility than that of the thousands available today. Indeed, there are a remarkable 6,912 world languages in existence today spoken in approximately 245 countries, including territories and disputed lands by over 6.7 billion people. However, for as many languages as there exist today, there are numerous languages that go unused or are only spoken by a few people and are headed for extinction.

This volume explores the reversing language shift (RLS) theory in the Mexican scenario from various viewpoints: The sociohistorical perspective delves into the dynamics of power that emerged in the Mexican colony as a result of the presence of Spanish. It examines the processes of external and internal Indianization affecting the early European protagonists and the varied dimensions of language shift and maintenance of the Mexican colonial period. The Mexican case sheds light upon language contact from the time in which Western civilization came into contact with the Mesoamerican peoples, for the encounter began with a demographic catastrophe that motivated a recovery mission. While the recovery of Mexican indigenous languages (MIL) was remarkable, RLS ended after fifty years of abundant productivity in MIL. Since then, the slow process of recovery is related to demographic changes, socioreligious movements, rebellion, confrontation, and survival strategies that have fostered language maintenance with bilingualism and language shift with culture preservation. The causes of the Chiapas uprising are analyzed in connection with the language attitudes of the indigenous peoples, while language policy is discussed in reference to the new Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2003). A quantitative classification of the MIL is offered with an overview of their geographic distribution, trends of macrosocietal bilingualism, use in the home domain, and permanence in the original Mesoamerican settlements. Innovative models of bilingual education are presented along with relevant data on several communities and the philosophies and methodologies justifying the programs. A model of Mazahua language use is presented along the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale.

What is the future of languages in an increasingly globalized world? Are we moving toward the use of a single language for global communication, or are there ways of managing language diversity at the international level? Can we, or should we, maintain a balance between the global need to communicate and the maintenance of local and regional identities and cultures? What is the role of education, of language rights, of language equality in this volatile global linguistic mix? A group of leading scholars in sociolinguistics and language policy examines trends in language use across the world to find answers to these questions and to make predictions about likely outcomes. Highlighted in the discussion are, among other issues, the rapidly changing role of English, the equally rapid decline and death of small languages, the future of the major European languages, the international use of constructed languages like Esperanto, and, not least, the question of what role applied scholarship can and should play in mapping and influencing the future.

This edited book examines the crucial role still played by African languages in pedagogy and literatures in the 21st century, generating insights into how they effectively serve cultural needs across the African continent and beyond. Boldly positioning African languages as key resources in the 21st century, chapters focus on themes such as language revolt by marginalized groups at grassroots level, the experience of American students learning African languages, female empowerment through the use of African languages in music, film and literary works, and immigration issues. The contributions are written by scholars of language, literature, education and linguistics, and the book will be of interest to students and scholars in these and related areas.

English fulfils important intra- and international functions in 21st century India. However, the country's size in terms of area, population, and linguistic diversity means that completely uniform developments in Indian English (IndE) are unlikely. Using sophisticated corpus-linguistic and statistical methods, this Element explores the unity and diversity of IndE by providing studies of selected lexical and morphosyntactic features that characterise Indian English(es) in the 21st century. The findings indicate a degree of incipient 'supralocalisation', i.e. a spread of features beyond their place of origin, cutting through the typological Indo-Aryan vs. Dravidian divide.

The Handbook systematically charts the trajectory of the English novel from its emergence as the foremost literary genre in the early twentieth century to its early twenty-first century status of eccentric eminence in new media environments. Systematic chapters address ̒The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genreʼ, ̒The Novel in the Economy’, ̒Genres’, ̒Gender’ (performativity, masculinities, feminism, queer), and ̒The Burden of Representationʼ (class and ethnicity). Extended contextualized close readings of more than twenty key texts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) supplement the systematic approach and encourage future research by providing overviews of reception and theoretical perspectives.

This volume analyses the policymaking, expectations, implementation, progress, and outcomes of early language learning in various education policy contexts worldwide. The contributors to the volume are international researchers specialising in language policy and early language learning and their contributions aim to advance scholarship on early language learning policies and inform policymaking at the global level. The languages considered include learning English as a second language in primary schools in Japan, Mexico, Serbia, Argentina, and Tanzania; Spanish language education in the US and Australia; Arabic as a second language in Israel and Bangladesh; Chinese in South America and Oceania; and finally, early German teaching and learning in France and the UK.

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field, and hence relationships are at its heart. First and foremost is the relationship between its two parent disciplines, psychology and linguistics, a relationship which has changed and advanced over the half century of the field's independent existence. At the beginning of the 21st Century, psycholinguistics forms part of the rapidly developing enterprise known as cognitive neuroscience, in which the relationship between biology and behavior plays a central role. Psycholinguistics is about language in communication, so that the relationship between language production and comprehension has always been important, and as psycholinguistics is an experimental discipline, it is likewise essential to find the right relationship between model and experiment. This book focuses in turn on each of these four cornerstone relationships: Psychology and Linguistics, Biology and Behavior, Production and Comprehension, and Model and Experiment. The authors are from different disciplinary backgrounds, but share a commitment to clarify the ways that their research illuminates the essential nature of the psycholinguistic enterprise.

"This book analyzes the state of the Welsh language at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with contributions from leading scholars in the fields of sociology and language policy. The intention is to update our current understanding of Welsh as a living language; how its use, learning, understanding teaching, evolution and promulgation are developing in the brave new world of the twenty-first century where Welsh is spreading to the internet, electronic dictionaries and encyclopaedias.