Multilingualism is a meaningful and capacious idea about human meaning-making practice, one with a promising, tumultuous, and flawed present - and a future worth caring for in research and public life. In this book, David Gramling presents original new insights into the topical subject of multilingualism, describing its powerful social, economic and political discourses. On one hand, it is under acute pressure to bear the demands of new global supply-chains, profit margins, and supranational unions, and on the other it is under pressure to make way for what some consider to be better descriptors of linguistic practice, such as translanguaging. The book shows how multilingualism is usefully able to encompass complex, divergent, and sometimes opposing experiences and ideas, in a wide array of planetary contexts - fictitious and real, political and social, North and South, colonial and decolonial, individual and collective, oppressive and liberatory, embodied and prosthetic, present and past.

The first book in the humanities and social sciences to offer an extensive conceptual definition of monolingualism, based on literary, applied-linguistic, technological, and translational examples.

Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.

This volume gives an up-to-date account of various situations of language contact and multilingualism in Europe especially from a historical point of view. Its ten contributions present newly collected data from different parts of the continent seen through diverse theoretical perspectives. They show a richness of topics and data that not only reveal numerous historical and sociological facts but also afford considerable insight into possible effects multilingualism and language contact might have on language change. The collection begins its journey through Europe in the British Isles. Then it turns to northern Europe and looks at how multilingualism worked in three towns that are all marked by border and contact situations. The journey continues with linguistic-historical and political-historical visits to Sweden and to Lithuania before the reader is taken to central Europe, where we will deal with the influence of Latin on written German.As far as southern Europe is concerned, the study continues on the Iberian peninsula, where the relationship between Portuguese and Spanish is focused, to be followed by Sardinia and Malta, two islands whose unique geohistorical positions give rise to some consideration of multilingualism in the Mediterranean.

Multilingualism in the Early Years is a highly accessible text that examines the political, theoretical, ideological and practical issues involved in the education of children speaking two or more languages. Drawing on current research and thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of being multilingual, Smidt uses powerful case studies to reveal how language or languages are acquired. She explores language in terms of who shares it, its relationship to class, culture, power, identity and thinking, and its fascinating role as it moves from the personal to the public and political. More specifically the book studies: what it means to be bilingual through an analysis of the language histories submitted by a range of people; how language/s define people; a brief history of minority education in the UK; how practitioners and teachers can best support all young children as learners whilst they continue to use their first languages and remain part of and partners in their communities and cultures; being bilingual: an advantage or a disadvantage? the impact of multilingualism on children’s educational and life chances. Multilingualism in the Early Years is a really useful text for practitioners working with multilingual children, as well as any student undertaking courses in early childhood education.

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French has been studied mainly from monolingual perspectives tracing the development towards modern Dutch or French. Van de Haar shows that the discussions on these languages were rooted in multilingual environments, in particular in French schools, Calvinist churches, printing houses, and chambers of rhetoric. The proposals that were formulated there to forge Dutch and French into useful forms were not directed solely at uniformization but were much more diverse.

This book questions assumptions about the nature of language. Looking at diverse contexts from sign languages in Indonesia to literacy practices in Brazil, the authors argue that unless we change and reconstitute the ways in which languages are taught and conceptualized, language studies will not be able to improve the social welfare of language users.

Explores the roots of Europe's struggle with multilingualism. This book argues that, over the centuries, the pursuit of linguistic homogeneity has become a central aspect of the mindset of Europeans. It offers an overview of the emergence of a standard language ideology and its relationship with ethnicity, territorial unity and social mobility

This volume gives an up-to-date account of the language situation and social context in multilingual Hong Kong. After an in-depth, interpretive analysis of various language contact phenomena, it shows why it is such a tall order for Hongkongers to live up to the Special Administrative Region government’s language policy goalpost, ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’. A detailed contrastive analysis between Cantonese and (a) English, (b) Modern Written Chinese, and (c) Putonghua helps explain the nature of the linguistic and acquisitional challenges involved. Economic forces and sociopolitical realities helped shape the ‘mother tongue education’ or ‘dual MoI streaming’ policy since September 1998. The book provides a critical review of the significant milestones and key policy documents from the early 1990s, and outlines the concerns of stakeholders at the receiving end. Another MoI debate concerns the feasibility and desirability of teaching Chinese in Putonghua (TCP). Based on a critical review of the TCP literature and recent psycholinguistic and neuroscience research, the language-in-education policy implications are discussed, followed by a few recommendations. Hongkongers of South Asian descent saw their life chances curtailed as a result of the post-1997 changes in the language requirements for gaining access to civil service positions and higher education. Based on a study of 15 South Asian undergraduate students’ prior language learning experiences, recommendations are made to help redress that social inequity problem.

Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct, an original inquiry into the development of that most essential-and mysterious-of human creations: Language "Language is mankind's greatest invention-except, of course, that it was never invented." So begins linguist Guy Deutscher's enthralling investigation into the genesis and evolution of language. If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning? Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings. As entertaining as it is erudite, The Unfolding of Language moves nimbly from ancient Babylonian to American idiom, from the central role of metaphor to the staggering triumph of design that is the Semitic verb, to tell the dramatic story and explain the genius behind a uniquely human faculty.