Indigenous languages are under siege, not only in the US but around the world – in danger of disappearing because they are not being transmitted to the next generation. Immigrants and their languages worldwide are similarly subjected to seemingly irresistible social, political, and economic pressures. This article discusses a number of such cases, including Shawandawa from the Brazilian Amazon, Quechua in the South American Andes, the East Indian communities of South Africa, Khmer in Philadelphia, Welsh, Maori, Turkish in the UK, and Native Californian languages. At a time when phrases like “endangered languages” and “linguicism” are invoked to describe the plight of the world's vanishing linguistic resources in their encounter with the phenomenal growth of world languages such as English, the cases reviewed here provide consistent and compelling evidence that language policy and language education serve as vehicles for promoting the vitality, versatility, and stability of these languages, and ultimately promote the rights of their speakers to participate in the global community on and IN their own terms. (Endangered languages, immigrant languages, indigenous languages, language revitalization, linguicism)

This article analyzes the use of metapragmatic description in the ethnoclassification of language by native speakers on the Franco-Antillean island of Saint Barthélemy. A prevalent technique for metapragmatic description is facilitated by the differential formation of honorific registers in the island's indigenous languages, so that speakers essentialize honorific pronouns as tropes of whole languages and classify the languages in such terms. This process reflects the varied geolinguistic and generational attributes of these speakers, whose register or social-dialectal calculations are all based ultimately on folk ideologies of honorification. (Classification, language ideology, French Creole, metapragmatics, Caribbean sociolinguistics)

In conversation, speakers occasionally use figurative expressions such as “had a good innings,” “take with a pinch of salt,” or “come to the end of her tether.” This article investigates WHERE in conversation such expressions are used, in terms of their sequential distribution. One clear distributional pattern is found: Figurative expressions occur regularly in topic transition sequences, and specifically in the turn where a topic is summarized, thereby initiating the closing of a topic. The paper discusses some of the distinctive features of the topic termination/transition sequences with which figurative closings are associated, particularly participants' orientation to their moving to new topics. Finally, the interactional use of figurative expressions is considered in the context of instances where their use fails to secure topical closure, manifesting some conflict (disaffiliation, etc.) between the participants. (Figurative expressions, idioms, conversation, topic)