Language and Culture in Society
Although there are psycholinguistic characteristics that all humans share, language learning and teaching is always embedded in cultural and social structures. Languages die out, their uses in a speech community shift over time, and new languages emerge. An individual may lose or gain fluency in a language, or several languages, over their lifetime.
These events are rarely because of conscious individual choice. Implicit or explicit language policies shape individual language use. The prestige or stigma attached to a particular language in a society will usually reflect power hierarchies in that society. Globalization creates demand for fluency in some of the dominant world languages, while at the same time it opens up opportunities for speakers of small languages to communicate easily over distances and use technologies to maintain or revitalize their languages
Resources, News, and Events

Edited by Terrence G. Wiley, Joy Kreeft Peyton, Donna Christian, Sarah Catherine K. Moore, Na Liu
Published by Routledge and the Center for Applied Linguistics
Related Projects

Funder: Over the next few years, STARTALK, a federal critical-need language learning initiative, is piloting an expansion of its traditional summer-only instructional model to a program that focuses on year-round outreach, with ... Read more

Funder: Center for Applied Linguistics

Funder: Carnegie Corporation of New York, via subcontract from MacNeil Lehrer Productions

Funder: U.S. Agency for International Development, via subcontract from the Education Development Center

Funder: U.S. Department of Defense, via subcontract from the University of Maryland, National Foreign Language Center
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