Volume: 5  Number: 1  Page: 1–16  doi:10.2167/ijm072.0

Multilingualism as a New Linguistic Dispensation

Larissa Aronin1 and David Singleton2 1Department of Foreign Languages, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel and 2CLCS, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

This paper aims to show that the development of multilingualism in the world has reached a point where, in terms of scale and significance, it is comparable with and assimilable to politico-economic aspects of globalisation, global mobility and ‘postmodern’ modes of thinking. The paper situates multilingualism in its relationship with the most dramatic social changes currently occurring in the world, notably the transformation of the experience of time and space, as well as global mobility, which has resulted in unprecedented diversity and heterogeneity in the populations of individual countries and regions. It argues that multilingualism is the ineluctable concomitant of all dimensions of globalisation and that the application in the relevant literature of the notion of a new linguistic dispensation to recent shifts in the language/society interface is entirely justified by the facts. Finally, taking an historical perspective, it seeks to make a case for the claim that, although multilingual individuals and societies have existed throughout the history of humankind, the present stage of global sociolinguistic arrangements is in fact a novel development.

Keywords: multilingualism, new linguistic dispensation, globalisation, historical multilingualism, contemporary multilingualism

© 2008 L. Aronin & D. Singleton

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