The Invention of Multilingualism

Explores what multilingualism means today, in a historical moment when it is under intense discursive and technological pressure.

This fascinating book explores how we reason about the value and status of multilingualism today, where we do so, and in relation to which persons, communities, and languages. The critical approach to multilingualism that this book traces is one that openly intends to strengthen the usability of this visionary concept.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.