Linguistic Explorations of Multilingualism

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of linguistic studies of multilingualism. In the beginning of this paper, a brief survey on attitude to the phenomenon of multilingualism and linguistic diversity throughout history is given, which shows that multilingualism has actually been natural to most human societies. Despite this fact, multilingual capacities of individuals and societies had generally been neglected in linguistic studies before the second half of the 20th century, with linguists having investigated mainly individual languages as isolated systems. Sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists were among first people to have realized the importance of avoiding of monolingual prejudices. With recent increased attention towards this phenomenon, multilingualism is today studied and explored in various linguistic disciplines. A large number of terms and fields of research shows that the study is gradually emerging as a new discipline, although the field would benefit from more common terms. Following the definition and delimitation of the basic terms related to multilingualism, perspective for future research is given.