1. F. Xavier Vila and Vanessa Bretxa: The Analysis of Medium-Sized Language Communities 
2. Jirí Nekvapil: The Main Challenges Facing Czech as a Medium-Sized Language: The State of Affairs at the Beginning of the 21st Century 
3. J. Normann Jørgensen: Challenges Facing Danish as a Medium-Sized Language 
4. Maja Bitenc: Slovene, between Purism and Plurilingualism 
5. Anat Stavans: Challenges Faced by a Medium-Sized Language Community (MSLC) in the 20th Century: The Case of Hebrew 
6. Delaney Michael Skerrett: Challenges for the Estonian Language: A Poststructuralist Perspective 
7. Uldis Ozolins: A Small National Language and its Multilingual Challenges: The Case of Latvian 
8. Emili Boix-Fuster and Jaume Farràs I Farràs: Is Catalan a Medium-Sized Language Community too? 
9. F. Xavier Vila: Challenges and Opportunities for MSLCs in the 21st Century: A (Preliminary) Synthesis 

Too small to be big, but also too big to be really small, medium-sized language communities (MSLCs) face their own challenges in a rapidly globalising world where multilingualism and mobility seem to be eroding the old securities that the monolingual nation states provided. The questions to be answered are numerous: What are the main areas in which the position of these languages is actually threatened? How do these societies manage their diversity (both old and new)? Has state machinery really become as irrelevant in terms of language policy as their portrayals often suggest? This book explores the responses to these and other challenges by seven relatively successful MSLCs, so that their lessons can be applied more generally to other languages striving for long term survival.

F. Xavier Vila is an associate professor in the Department of Catalan Philology and Director of the University Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication at the Universitat de Barcelona. He has published widely in the areas of sociolinguistics, demolinguistics and language policy, including Survival and Development of Language Communities: Prospects and Challenges (Multilingual Matters, 2013).