Introduction: Imagining Communities, Multilingually

Only a couple of years ago, one of our colleagues in linguistics was attempting to find monolingual speakers of Dutch. This proved nigh impossible: most potential research subjects confessed to having a sufficient command of English to hold everyday conversations, or spoke a specific regional language, or a diasporic language, or in another way appeared to move through various languages and linguistic registers in life. This case might be uniquely specific for the Netherlands – a small country with an international economy –, yet it appears true to us that the contemporary world is increasingly characterised by, and appreciative of, multilingualism. This emerging phenomenon reveals more than the pervasiveness of linguistic pluralism in patterns of communication both globally and locally. It also prompts us to explore the implications of multilingualism for how people in the West, if not worldwide, imagine the links between one another. How does the coexistence of different linguistic codes redefine speakers’ collective allegiances? How do literary and aesthetic representations symbolise the multiple identification mechanisms enabled by linguistic diversity and what do they entail for our understanding of community formation outside the frame of nationhood, which historically has relied upon geopolitical and linguistic delimitation?