Call for paper: The Impacts of Language Conflict in Educational Settings: When Language Contact becomes a Conflict in the Classroom

One of the many intriguing aspects of contact linguistics is conflict. Although language conflict between ethnic groups is sometimes wrongly perceived as political, economic or sociological in nature, it actually tends to result from language contact. Such conflicts negatively impact educational settings. How education can be used to settle language conflict has been shown to some extent by Labrie et al. (1993) and Nelde (1997). However, how language conflict interferes in the educational spheres has received much less attention.

The intersection of these two subjects is still understudied. Some governments have tackled the matter by means of policies. For example, the European Charter or Regional or Minority Languages published in 1992 which entered into force in 1998, names a number of measures that aim to promote the use of regional or minority languages in education (cf. Darquennes [2011] for a detailed overview). However, scholarly works that look into the aforementioned crisscrossing still remain scarce.

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