Defining Multilingualism

TLDR

Multilingualism, a widespread interdisciplinary phenomenon, is defined and scoped in this article, highlighting its study from individual and societal perspectives. The article aims to examine multiple dimensions and types of multilingualism, summarizing themes across neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistics, education, sociolinguistics, and language policy. It reviews language acquisition, processing, and social use, employing diverse research methodologies across these domains. The article concludes by contrasting monolingual and holistic perspectives, emphasizing recent approaches that promote fluid language boundaries.

Abstract

This article looks at the definitions and scope of multilingualism and the different perspectives used in its study. Multilingualism is a very common phenomenon that has received much scholarly attention in recent years. Multilingualism is also an interdisciplinary phenomenon that can be studied from both an individual and a societal perspective. In this article, several dimensions of multilingualism are considered, and different types of multilingualism are discussed. The article summarizes the themes researched in various areas of the study of multilingualism such as neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistics, education, sociolinguistics, and language policy. These areas look at language acquisition and language processing as well as the use of different languages in social contexts and adopt a variety of research methodologies. The last section of the article compares monolingual and holistic perspectives in the study of multilingualism, paying special attention to new approaches developed in the past few years that argue for establishing more fluid boundaries between languages.