Language in the 21st CenturyHumphrey Tonkin, Timothy G. Reagan 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. |
Contents
Language and the pursuit of the millennium | 1 |
Overcoming disadvantage | 23 |
A worldcentric approach to language policy | 47 |
Saving languages or helping | 67 |
Lessons from Canada | 87 |
A newly informed perspective | 115 |
Language and language education in the twentyfirst century | 133 |
Why learn foreign languages? Thoughts for a new millennium | 145 |
| 177 | |
Contributors | 197 |
Other editions - View all
Language in the Twenty-first Century: Selected Papers of the Millenial ... Humphrey Tonkin,Timothy G. Reagan No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
academic African languages American Ammon become bilingual CBLT challenge classroom communicative language teaching context countries discussion documentation economic endangered languages English language Esperanto European languages example extinction Fettes foreign language education French future German global language goal grammar groups guages human Humphrey Tonkin increasingly indigenous individual instruction interlingual issues Japanese K-selected knowledge language choice language communities language learning language of wider language planning language policy language shift language teachers learners lingua franca linguistic diversity linguistic nationalism Maffi ment minority languages modern monolingual multilingual Nancy Dorian national language native speakers non-native speakers oral participation perspective Pica Plurilingualism political potential questions Reagan require role scenario scholars second language Skutnabb-Kangas small languages social society sociolinguistic Spanish speak specific standard teachers and researchers teaching texts tion Tonkin traditional twenty-first century University University of Hartford varieties wider communication World English