Multilingualism, Discourse, and Ethnography

The last two decades have seen a rapidly growing interest, internationally, in multilingualism and multilingual literacy and in the ways in which multilingualism is represented in the media and in public discourse. This is largely due to the significant linguistic, cultural and demographic changes that have been ushered in by globalisation, transnational population flows, the advent of new technology and the changing political and economic landscape of Europe and the accession of new nation-states to the European Union. In addressing the changing field of multilingualism, this volume hopes to: to focus on cutting edge research on multilingualism which incorporates critical, interpretive perspectivesto exemplify the range of approaches to description and analysis which are currently employed within this strand of research on multilingualismto consider the methodological issues which arise in particular kinds of studies in particular sociolinguistic spaces.