![]() Multilinguals then are the one who have two or three languages in their repertoire. Thus, the term “multilingualism” is being used increasingly and it refers to societies, nations, individuals, who use more than one language in everyday life, in variety of situations to varying degrees. Īccording Franceschini, today the term multilingualism “denotes various forms of social, institutional and individual usage as well as individual and group competence, plus various contexts of contact and involvement with more than one language.” Franceschini states that the study of multilingual phenomena takes into account the practice of using more than one language, including regional languages, minority languages, migration languages, and language varieties such as dialects, to varying degrees of proficiency among individuals and societies. It also encompasses the systemic development and evolving status of the full spectrum of extant and emergent language varieties”. They view multilingualism as a “new linguistic dispensation,” which means “language ideologies and policies, language education in all its dimensions, and the patterns of language use of communities and individuals. They describe it as a new social phenomenon in itself, not just adding numbers of languages to individuals and societies. Aronin and Singleton share with Blommaert’s similar ideas about multilingualism. He connects these ideologies with the ideas people have about the way of using languages they possess, the way they define a language and multilingualism, their beliefs about how language is used and how it works. He further points out language ideologies in his conception about multilingualism. Īccording to Blommaert, we are all multilingual to a certain degree since we use different “linguistic varieties, genres, registers, accents,” and it does not matter if our linguistic recourses belong only to one “conventionally defined language” or several of them. Among the resources are concrete accents, language varieties, registers, styles, modalities such as writing ways of using language in certain communicative situations and spheres of life, and people’s ideas about such methods of utilizing their linguistic ideologies. Thus, Weber and Horner do not distinguish between such terms as bilingualism and trilingual, but subsume them under one concept of “multilingualism.” Multilingualism, thus, ought not to be seen as a collection of languages that a speaker control, but it may be seen as a complex semiotic asset, of which a traditional defined “language” has a place in a few, while a distinct “language” has a place in others. In the book Introducing Multilingualism, Weber and Horner refer to Blommaert’s definition of “multilingualism” and they state that we all have a variety of linguistic resources at our disposal and it can refer not just to one or two languages one may possess. Hammarberg states that multilingualism is the normal condition of language ability and that humans are multilingual by nature. As society moves ahead, the expansion of multilingualism is attributed to the social, linguistic, and cultural changes derived from globalization, geographical, and social mobility, economic and political transformations, and the development of technology. Besides, Edwards and Aronin contend that multilingualism is the phenomena of the present age however, it has existed throughout the whole of human history. Multilingualism alludes to both a person’s capacity to utilize a few dialects and the coexistence of distinctive language communities in one geological area. Furthermore, factors inducing multilingualism among different speech communities and individuals have been reviewed and finally, recent developments and dynamics toward the spread of multilingualism in various parts of the world are also presented in the chapter. Further, some of the relevant issues related to language choice and use in multilingual speech communities in different parts of the globe are reviewed and included. Besides, concepts such as bilingualism and multilingualism and their dynamics in the field of sociolinguistics have been critically been reviewed and presented from the theoretical and empirical perspectives. The focus of this book chapter is to succinctly present the sociolinguistic aspects of language choice and use of multilingual speakers in various domains. Although it is difficult to provide the exact statistical data on the multilingual speakers and distribution of multilingualism in the world, sociolinguists and linguists estimate that there are roughly around 6000 languages in the world. Experts know that multilingualism is not the so-called minority phenomenon as many people think it to be.
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