The Routledge handbook of multilingualism is separated into five topic areas, each amply illustrated with several chapters covering studies and overviews of the subfields, with a total of thirty-two chapters and forty-nine contributors. The chapters cover a range of multilingual environments and situations, although research on the southern hemisphere is underrepresented. It is not possible here to summarize each chapter, but the following summarizes the key areas and some highlights.
The first part discusses discourses about multilingualism across political and historical contexts, and includes several chapters on historical and contemporary language rights, particularly in the cases of minority languages (including sign languages), colonialism, and indigenous groups. Highlights include chapter 4 (Alexandra Jaffe) on how languages are treated in policies with respect to linguistic competence and language ‘worth’, and chapter 7 (Stephen May) on the linguistic rights of multilingual speakers, areas, and communities.
The second part focuses on multilingualism and education. Chapters here include issues relating to indigenous languages, language revitalization, effects of Global English, and how pedagogies are affected and can be enhanced by multilingual and/or plurilingual approaches. One highlight of this section is chapter 10 (Durk Gorter & Jasone Cenoz) on language revitalization with particular reference to minority languages.
The third part focuses on multilingualism in other institutional sites, such as in the workplace, legal settings, public services, media, religion, and on the relationship between multilingualism and social exclusion. Of particular note is chapter 16 (Ingrid Piller) on how monolingual biases can lead to social exclusion and under- or unemployment.
The fourth part discusses multilingualism in social and cultural change. Key focuses here are how multilingualism affects the new economy, and how multilingualism interacts with the internet, popular culture, and gender. A highlight is chapter 24 (Kimie Takahashi) on how women are affected and represented through multilingual situations and practices.
The fifth and final part is dedicated to multilingualism in situated practices, lived realities. This section contains the broadest spread of topics, including such themes as multilingual emotions, code-switching and crossing, heteroglossia, literacy/literacies, and ‘multilingua francas’. Chapter 25 (Sinfree Makoni & Alastair Pennycook) calls into question the traditional models of language, advocating the invention of multilingually based approaches.
A recurrent theme throughout this volume is that multilingualism should not be viewed as additive or subtractive proficiency in each language to an equal degree. Instead, multilingualism in practice encompasses many speakers who use specific languages in specific environments (e.g. ritual or religious language, accessing public services, etc.), or use a mix of all languages (e.g. Montreal rap and hip-hop culture, classroom discourse, street markets of multilingual cities, etc.) to communicate more effectively.
Overall, this book will be of great interest to researchers and policy advisors who work on language in education as well as education in languages, second and foreign language acquisition, linguistic anthropology, language policy, and linguistic or language rights.
