The literature on Indigenous language revitalization is dominated by sociolinguistic and normative approaches that focus on “the vitality of languages, the multiple facets of linguistic landscapes, and the effects of language policies on individuals and groups” (Sonntag and Cardinal, 2015: 6). Very little research, however, has been done using the tools of political science and public policy to analyze the emergence of language policies or the choices made by governments and organizations to protect, preserve and revitalize Indigenous languages. Using an historical institutionalist approach, this paper will examine the decline and revitalization of Manx Gaelic (Manx), the Indigenous language of the Isle of Man, a small island jurisdiction in the British Isles. Manx has been critically endangered for many decades, following its slow decline during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in recent years has undergone a process of revitalization spearheaded by civil society organizations in partnership with government. The chapter identifies and discusses the reasons why Manx went into decline and the opportunities and challenges associated with promoting and sustaining its revitalization.

This chapter focuses on changes in language policy in Wales between the 1960s and the present. The discussion illustrates how drawing on the concept of state tradition can help to explain why it has been possible for a general policy trajectory that has been increasingly supportive of the Welsh language to emerge during this period. However, the chapter argues that the concept of state tradition seems somewhat constrained in explaining more specific and detailed episodes in the development of language policy in Wales over recent decades. In particular, it is less able to explain why specific policies were adopted at particular junctures. Building on this, the chapter contributes to the volume by demonstrating how the insights of the state traditions and language regimes framework could be deepened if supplemented with a more explicit focus on how institutional factors across multiple levels of government can shape language policy choices, particularly in relation to regional or minority languages such as Welsh.

What might it mean to reject the white gaze when seeking to understand the language and literacy practices of Black immigrant youth from the English-speaking Caribbean? What does it mean for these youth to refuse to be defined by the raciolinguistic ideologies that have historically and systematically misapprehended and distorted their multiple literacies and rich everyday forms of translanguaging? How can focusing our attention on these youth’s perspectives on their own language and literacy practices help to redirect and expand our understanding of language, literacy, and race more broadly?

Hong Kong’s Handover from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 could have brought about rapid and momentous changes to Hong Kong’s language regime. Change, however, has for the most part been incremental, and much of the British-era’s language regime remains largely intact today, including the salience of English in many domains. At the same time, language policy changes did occur, mainly through the educational policy of biliteracy and trilingualism, which added Mandarin to the de facto English-Cantonese bilingual regime. However, nearly half-way through the transition period, Mandarin use has made few notable inroads in Hong Kong society, though there are signs that this may be about to change - perhaps drastically so. This paper analyzes the evolution of Hong Kong’s language regime from its unique perspective as a city connected to the global community like few others, and located between two state traditions - one marked by pluralist, laissez-faire capitalism, and the other by Communism and totalitarian state nationalism. Overall, this case study of Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of colonial legacies, competing mobilizations, incremental change, and multilevel governance as it helps to expand the STLR framework.

The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.

This introductory chapter situates the book within the field of comparative politics, noting its distinction from debates that focused on the language planning process, on social mobilization to secure language rights, or on linguistic justice. Instead, it highlights state traditions that produce language regimes, which themselves have a powerful influence on language policy choices. The introduction provides two diagrams that frame the theoretical conception and identifies how each chapter contribution deepens and refines the framework.

In this chapter, I synthesize the findings from the study presented in the book. Reflecting on these findings, I then identify and discuss recommendations for instantiating the translanguaging imaginaries of all youth through a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence, sans white gaze, as a potentially vibrant literate characteristic of Black Caribbean immigrant students specifically, and also, of all humans. The scholarly recommendations proposed outline future directions for research that invite intersectionally and transdisciplinary driven investigations into how youth’s holistic literacies across geographies, languages, races, and cultures function as disparate pieces of one interdependent puzzle in the problem-solving necessary to flourish and to design imaginary presents and futures, using the meaning-making undergirding their translanguaging practices. I outline also practical recommendations useful for researchers, teachers, administrators, and policymakers who wish to support Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s holistic literacies. The recommendations proposed also allow all youth whose language and raciosemiotic architecture can allow them, through these holistic literacies, to design translanguaging futures as new beings engaging transraciolinguistically, in solidarity. I conclude with a painting of liberatory Caribbean imaginaries as a version of what this notion of literacy and language teaching and learning might look like and of what it means to embark on a collective return to inonsans jan nwè.

India’s language policy choices soon after independence established a complex and multifaceted language regime that is often deemed a success for an immensely diverse postcolonial state. It is argued that its choices were informed by a demotic tradition that emerged in various regions of the subcontinent in the precolonial period and that was reconfigured under colonialism. First, what is called “demotic regionalism” is traced back to vernacularization in precolonial India, when local languages began being used in regional political-sociocultural realms in lieu of Sanskrit. Regional variations in whether vernacularization was state driven or demos driven often reflected the strength of the demotic norm in constituting demotic regionalism, informing language regimes that were fluid, multilingual, and increasingly inclusive. The chapter then discusses how colonialism reconfigured the demotic regionalism tradition, muting the demotic norm and replacing it with ethnicity, creating a colonial language regime that was still multilingual but rigid and hierarchical, and that compromised diversity. It then details India’s postindependence language regime, demonstrating how demotic regionalism informed specific policy choices while being mediated by colonial legacies and imperatives of the modern state. The final section shows how this language regime has remained multilingual and hierarchical, albeit by way of democratic politics rather than colonial fiat.

This chapter provides the reader with a depiction of the methodology involved in conducting the study of Black immigrant youth’s literacies presented in the book. I begin with an overview of who I am, how I am situated in the study, and what I bring to this book as a person and as a Black-immigrant-scholar-single-parent-mother-educator. A discussion of the (decolonizing) interpretive research design is then presented and justified. The context of the study is described, followed by a detailed description of participants and informants (i.e., secondary participants) involved in the study. The protocols for collecting data are discussed. This is followed by the procedures for collecting data from participants. The analytical discussion follows, accompanied by an example of the analytical process used to organize and narrate the data. Credibility, verisimilitude, and transferability are then addressed.