This work brings together cutting-edge scholarship in language, education and society from all parts of the world. Celebrating the 60th birthday of Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, it is inspired by her work in minority, indigenous and immigrant education; multilingualism; linguistic human rights; and global language and power issues. Drawn from all parts of the world, the contributors are active in a range of scientific and professional areas including bilingual education; sociolinguistics; the sociology of education, law and language; economics and language; linguistics; sign language; racism; communication; discourse analysis; language policy; minority issues; and language pedagogy. The book situates issues of minorities and bilingual education in broader perspectives of human rights, power and the ecology of language. It aims at a distillation of themes that are central to an understanding of language rights and how these are experienced, analyzed and negotiated in education. The thrust of the papers is on analysis, links between solid research and advocacy, successful struggles for minority rights, and equity.
Together, they provide a provocative challenge to our ways of thinking about language, how language rights are formulated and implemented, how speakers of all languages can be treatd more equitably, and how multilingualism can be promoted in the wider society and more specifically in education. The rich mix of papers serves to underline that the issues are comparable worldwide, that many disparate topics can cross-fertilize each other, and that our understanding of the issues can benefit from coverage that is global, reflective and committed.