In this powerful, multidisciplinary book, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas shows how most indigenous and minority education contributes to linguistic genocide according to United Nations definitions. Theory is combined with a wealth of factual encyclopedic information and with many examples and vignettes. The examples come from all parts of the world and try to avoid Eurocentrism. Oriented toward theory and practice, facts and evaluations, and reflection and action, the book prompts readers to find information about the world and their local contexts, to reflect and to act.
A Web site with...

This book analyzes policy issues regarding the education of minority students in western industrialized societies and presents a number of case studies of programs that have been successful in reversing the pattern of minority students' academic failure. A central theme throughout is that the causes of minority students' academic difficulties are rooted in the power relations between the dominant and subordinate groups in society and that educators should enable minority students to empower themselves.

Only a few hundred of the world's 6,000-7,000 languages have any kind of official status, and it is only speakers of official languages (speakers of dominant majority languages) who enjoy all linguistic human rights. As many of the collected papers in this book document, most linguistic minorities are deprived of these rights. This book describes what linguistic human rights are, who has and who does not have them and why, and suggests which linguistic rights should be regarded as basic human rights. Linguistic Human Rights introduces a new area, combining sociolinguistics, educational, and...

From Periphery to Center. This book documents current research showing how, in poor countries where educational practices are inclusive of linguistic diversity and responsive to local conditions, implementation of bi/multiilingual education in both system-wide and minority settings can be successful.

This very original, inspirational book globalises our understanding of languages in education and changes our understanding of bilingual and multilingual education from something mostly western to being truly transnational: it spotlights the small, celebrates African and Asian cases of multilingual classrooms and demonstrates that such education is universally successful.

Colin R. Baker, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Bangor University, Bangor, Wales, UK

A norm-setting work on multilingual education, which combines theoretical perspectives with practical experience...

Research on Language Rights has produced an enormous and unwieldy corpus of literature. Moreover, such work is often controversial and contested, in part because of the need for scholars from different disciplinary traditions to coordinate their concerns and integrate conflicting paradigms.

Now, to enable researchers and advanced students to make sense of this vast literature, and the competing scholarly approaches, Routledge announces Language Rights, a new title in its Critical Concepts in Language Studies series. In four volumes, the set draws on a wide range of...