This book examines the efforts of the French-speaking minority in Flanders, Belgium, to maintain a legal and social presence of the French language in Flemish public life. Chronologically, the study is bookended by two developments, almost exactly a century apart. In 1873, the first laws were passed which required the use of Dutch in some aspects of public administration in Flanders, challenging the de facto use of French among the Flemish ruling class. One hundred and one years later, the last French daily newspaper in Flanders collapsed, marking the end of a once-vibrant French-language public sphere in Flanders. The author contends that the methods and arguments by which French speakers defended the role of French in Flemish public life changed along with the social and political situation of this minority. As the Flemish movement grew over the course of the twentieth century, French speakers’ appeals to the “free choice” of language lost traction, and they put forward claims that they represented an ethnolinguistic minority who deserved protection for their mother tongue. Providing new insights for scholars of European history, and in conversation with the literature on liberalism, national identity, and Francophonie, this book demonstrates how the debate over the role of French in Flanders was at the center of Belgium’s ethnolinguistic conflict – the repercussions of which continue to be felt to this day.

This book examines a century of research on the relationship between bilingualism and intelligence and relates it to more recent research on bilingualism and executive functioning. In doing so, it highlights how bilingualism research has been understood and used by wider society and its impact on current debates in cognitive science as well as language policy and education.

This book contrasts variations in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, using as a reference for discussion the mainstream careful speech of news anchors at the national level or the equivalent type of speech: a well-educated style that nonetheless sounds natural. Pursuing an innovative approach, the book uses this view of language as a cornerstone to describe and discuss other social and regional variants relative to that speaking register. It is aimed at speakers of Spanish interested in learning Portuguese and speakers of Portuguese who want to learn Spanish, as well as language specialists interested in bilingualism, heritage languages, in the teaching of typologically similar languages in contrast, and readers with interest in Phonetics and Phonology. The book employs a variety of innovative approaches, especially the reinterpretation of some of the traditional concept in Phonetics, and the use of speech prosodies and speech melodies, a user-friendly strategy to describe speech prosody in languages and speech melody in music through musical notation.

This book contrasts variations in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, using as a reference for discussion the mainstream careful speech of news anchors at the national level or the equivalent type of speech: a well-educated style that nonetheless sounds natural. Pursuing an innovative approach, the book uses this view of language as a cornerstone to describe and discuss other social and regional variants relative to that speaking register. It is aimed at speakers of Spanish interested in learning Portuguese and speakers of Portuguese who want to learn Spanish, as well as language specialists interested in bilingualism, heritage languages, in the teaching of typologically similar languages in contrast, and readers with interest in Phonetics and Phonology. The book employs a variety of innovative approaches, especially the reinterpretation of some of the traditional concept in Phonetics, and the use of speech prosodies and speech melodies, a user-friendly strategy to describe speech prosody in languages and speech melody in music through musical notation.

This book promotes understanding of multilingualism based on the research efforts at the frontiers with state-of-the-art approaches or novel interdisciplinary perspectives.