Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism: Language Identity, Ideology, and Practice in Dynamic Cultural Worlds

Bridging the fields of youth studies and language planning and policy, this book takes a close, nuanced look at Indigenous youth bi/multilingualism across diverse cultural and linguistic settings, drawing out comparisons, contrasts, and important implications for language planning and policy and for projects designed to curtail language loss. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars with longstanding ties to language planning efforts in diverse Indigenous communities examine language policy and planning as de facto and de jure – as covert and overt, bottom-up and top-down. This approach illuminates crosscutting themes of language identity and ideology, cultural conflict, and linguistic human rights as youth negotiate these issues within rapidly changing sociolinguistic contexts. A distinctive feature of the book is its chapters and commentaries by Indigenous scholars writing about their own communities.

This landmark volume stands alone in offering a look at diverse Indigenous youth in multiple endangered language communities, new theoretical, empirical, and methodological insights, and lessons for intergenerational language planning in dynamic sociocultural contexts.

Leisy T. Wyman is Associate Professor in the Language, Reading and Culture Program, and affiliate faculty in the American Indian Studies and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Programs at the University of Arizona, USA.

Teresa L. McCarty is the George F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Alice Wiley Snell Professor Emerita of Education Policy Studies at Arizona State University, USA.

Sheilah E. Nicholas (Hopi) is Assistant Professor in the Language, Reading, and Culture Program, and affiliate faculty in the American Indian Studies and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Programs at the University of Arizona, USA.