ABSTRACT
In recent decades, the twin issues of language rights and language survival have gained importance among activists and academics concerned with indigenous and other minority languages. This comes in part from an increased understanding of the academic disadvantages that children face when they are educated in an imposed language (see e.g. Cummins 1993, 1996) – an awareness that has ar guably been the major force behind the drive to make education in vernacular languages a universal right. It also arises from a concern, voiced in particular by linguists, over the rapid decrease in the number of languages throughout the world as they are pushed aside by state education policies or by the wider processes of globalization. This concern has been voiced most recently in ecological terms, as a plea for the preservation of the ‘stability and resiliency’ of the world’ s cultures by maintaining language diversity (T erralingua 2002, cited in Harvey 2003: 249).
