Stichwort: Mehrsprachigkeit

The article provides an introduction to the state of the art in research on migration induced multilingualism. At first, recent research on the dynamics of migration is taken up, showing that practices and types of migration have changed dramatically in the past two decades. These changes lead to linguistic textures in societies that go beyond all forms of complexity ever experienced before. The theoretical concept of super-diversity tries to capture the new types of complexity. It is presented in the first chapter of this article. Actual super-diversity in migration areas is confronted with traditional self-concepts of homogeneity and monolingualism as the regular case in societies, in chapter two. A historical analysis in chapter three illustrates the development of the linguistic self-image of classical, i.e. European nation states. This concept of linguistic normality—a monolingual habitus—sets the frame not only for actual language practice and language policies in many nation states world-wide, but has also influenced important parts of scientific research and discourse on multilingualism. Chapters four and five deal with the state of knowledge concerning language development in multilingual contexts, and present the controversy about bilingual education. In the final chapter, perspectives for future research on multilingualism and education are presented that take linguistic super-diversity into account.