Planning and teaching heritage languages in the translocal and digital space

This Special Issue came about as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought unprecedented shifts in the conditions and opportunities for language education. In the context of heritage languages, there were significant challenges for learners, parents, and teachers, but there were also new opportunities for rethinking the ways in which languages were taught and passed on to the next generation. In this Special Issue, we take an ecological perspective on language policy and planning (henceforward LPP) and focus on micro- and meso-level LPP related to language learning and the intergenerational transmission of heritage languages. While the approach taken in this volume aligns with the notion that macro, meso and micro perspectives, goals and activities are not independent of each other but form a complex ecology (Baldauf, Citation2006), our focus here is not on formal policy making and implementation, but on the practices surrounding language learning, teaching and use, as forms of LPP (Liddicoat, Citation2020).