Population Mobility and Language Spread

Voluntary international population migration, as we nowadays know it, started with the Discoveries in the fifteenth century, and was particularly in effect during the sixteenth century. The milestones for this type of population mobility were set by the Portuguese and their Patronage, and later on reinforced by the Industrial Revolution and the economic changes that took place in Europe and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Arroteia 1983; Cepeda 1995, p. 10). Today, there are studies at the micro-level documenting that immigration may lead to an increasing enrolment in private schools in order to avoid the immigrant population in public schools (Mavisakalyan 2011).