Multilinguals are not multiple monolinguals. Yet multilingual assessment proceeds through monolingual norms, as if fair conclusions were possible in the absence of fair comparison. In addition, multilingualism concerns what people do with language, not what languages do to people. Yet research focus remains on multilinguals' languages, as if languages existed despite their users. This book redresses these paradoxes. Multilingual scholars, teachers and speech-language clinicians from Europe, Asia, Australia and the US contribute the first studies dedicated to multilingual norms, those found in real-life multilingual development, assessment and use. Readership includes educators, clinicians, decision-makers and researchers interested in multilingualism.

With cultural and linguistic diversity, migration, and constant change as defining features of contemporary societies, it is increasingly necessary to enhance our capabilities within multilingual environments. Reconceptualizing Language Norms in Multilingual Contexts offers a groundbreaking exploration of language practices and norms in the diverse and dynamic world we inhabit today. It challenges the traditional understanding of language norms as stable and stationary. Instead, it embraces multiculturalism and multilingualism as the norm rather than the exception. Drawing upon a wide range of methodological approaches, this book brings together a collection of position papers, critical reflections, and explorations by emerging and established voices in the field. It delves into how language norms emerge, evolve, and shape communication in both collective and individual contexts of diversity. By reconceptualizing language norms, this book sheds light on real and relevant language practices in multilingual and multicultural spaces, offering insights from the people who inhabit and navigate these contexts. While the content of this book revolves around everyday communication, its academic approaches and comprehensive exploration make it a valuable resource for graduate students, educators, and researchers in the fields of multilingualism and applied linguistics. By bridging the gap between language norms and multilingualism, this book seeks to advance our understanding of language practices in the increasingly interconnected and diverse world.

This collection brings together research on linguistic prescriptivism and social identities, in specific contemporary and historical contexts of cross-cultural contact and awareness. Providing multilingual and multidisciplinary perspectives from language studies, lexicography, literature, and cultural studies, our contributors relate language norms to frameworks of identity beyond monolingual citizenship - nativeness, ethnicity, politics, religion, empire. Some chapters focus on traditional instruments of prescriptivism: language academies in Europe; government language planners in southeast Asia; dictionaries and grammars from Early Modern and imperial Britain, republican America, the postcolonial Caribbean, and modern Germany. Other chapters consider the roles of scholars in prescriptivism, as well as the more informal and populist mechanisms of enforcement expressed in newspapers. With a thematic introduction articulating links between its breadth of perspectives, this accessible book should engage everyone concerned with language norms.

This important contribution to the sociolinguistics of Asian languages breaks new ground in the study of language standards and standardization in two key ways: in its focus on Asia, with particular attention paid to China and its neighbours, and in the attention paid to multilingual contexts. The chapters address various kinds of (sometimes hidden) multilingualism and examine the interactions between multilingualism and language standardization, offering a corrective to earlier work on standardization, which has tended to assume a monolingual nation state and monolingual individuals. Taken together, the chapters in this book thus add to our understanding of the ways in which multilingualism is implicated in language standardization, as well as the impact of language standards on multilingualism. The introduction, Chapter 6 and Chapter 8 are free to download as open access publications. You can access them here: Introduction: https://zenodo.org/record/5749388#.YaiwuNDP3cs Chapter 6: https://zenodo.org/record/5749522#.Yaiw-9DP3cs Chapter 8: https://zenodo.org/record/5749586#.Yai0RNDP3cs

The book treats different aspects of language norms. One focus is on standardization and language policy. Other contributions investigate the construction of L2 norms by learners and norms in classroom interaction. Discourse norms are theorized and the way language users make them relevant and explicit is examined in various communicative contexts.

A critical and systematic review of existing research located at the crossroads of sociology, social psychology and applied linguistics, Languages and Social Cohesion offers valuable insights for social contexts in which decision makers and researchers grapple with questions of social cohesion in the presence of linguistic diversity. Based on a thematic analysis of 285 studies from 50 countries (references available), this book emphasises the crucial role languages play in understanding social cohesion and provides a framework of perspectives to aid exploration of these complex interlinkages. Through interpreting the literature, the authors establish language repertoires as tools that facilitate social networks and access to resources. Furthermore, language norms and allegiances can subjectively shape the way groups use their language resources, which can result in social inclusion, exclusion and mediation between language groups. Education in particular is highlighted as a policy tool that implements linguistic decisions and norms, and steers status, hierarchies and distribution of languages in society. The theory-informed and accessible tools featured can be used to guide and inform further research, workshops or projects that investigate social cohesion and languages. This book is relevant to diverse and intersecting spheres of influence, such as groups, communities, institutions and authorities at local, regional, national and international levels.

Among the growing number of publications on promoting English as an International Language (EIL), little has been written on the complexities that the EIL paradigm has brought to the teaching and learning of English in the classroom. This edited book seeks to address this deficit in the literature by bringing together narratives of the realities that EIL practitioners encountered in their diverse teaching contexts, including Indonesia, the Pacific islands, USA, and Australia; the struggles, tensions, dilemmas, and quests of living as EIL practitioners in specific teaching contexts and wider English communities in general are all explored in this book. It explores pedagogical practices, understandings, and challenges surrounding the implementation of EIL pedagogy and principles in contexts where English is traditionally described as a second language or foreign language. This book will be of interest to teachers, academics, and research students working in the areas of ELT, critical applied linguistics, EIL, language and identity, and English language teacher education. It can also be used to complement university-level textbooks in these areas. The book provides theoretical and contextual knowledge for practicing teachers and teacher educators seeking to understand and explore the teaching and learning realities of implementing EIL in the classroom.