Language and Multilingual Societies

Every society has a number of choices to make in terms of which language will be used in that society and when. When it comes to multilingual societies, decisions also need to be made concerning how many languages the society will support, how many languages members of the society are expected to learn, and so on.  In this session, we’ll take a brief look at the layers of language use in multilingual and bilingual societies.  We’ll then consider some of the language policy choices that governments must make.  Finally, we’ll explore how individuals in a multilingual society use language.