One Society, Many Languages

This chapter moves into the approach to the study of language in its social context that we are calling ‘sociology of language’. Many people around the world speak more than one language, and there are many societies in which more than one language is spoken. We’ll focus on the ‘micro’ aspects of multilingualism (that is, the linguistic dimensions of multilingualism) in Chapter 13. In this chapter, we focus on the ‘macro’ aspects—the social dimensions of multilingualism—by considering the social factors that constrain the linguistic choices speakers in a multilingual society make and what the sociolinguistic consequences of those choices are.