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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The Center for Applied Linguistics is a nonprofit organization promoting access, equity, and mutual understanding for linguistically and culturally diverse people around the world.
