Bilingualism

by Monica Heller

This volume provides a critical examination of the notion of bilingualism as it has developed in linguistics and of its use in discourses of social regulation in State and civil society in the 20th and 21st centuries. It attempts to move the field away from a common sense, but in fact highly ideologized, view of bilingualism as the co-existence of two linguistic systems, and to develop a critical perspective which approaches bilingualism in a way that allows for a better grasp of the ways in which language practices and socially and politically embedded. Students and researchers will find a fresh, expansive and critical view of bilingualism, underpinned by cutting-edge research, The book as a whole demonstrates that it is fruitful to examine these processes historically, from a political economy perspective, but that the questions it raises require linking linguistic form to linguistic practice in a number of sites and in a number of ways.