Endangered Species “Bilingualism”? How We Spin Constructs to Suit Our Purposes

In linguistics, as in all scientific fields, it is important to clearly define constructs. Whilst some are less disputable, others, especially those popular in general press, are easily misconstrued. In recent years, multilingualism seems to have become one of these latter terms. This has repercussions for both research and educational policy and practice. The present paper questions the differential use of multilingual and bilingual in scientific and press forums, using the example of one of the main languages of publication in Europe, German. To this end, it examines the largest written newspaper corpus available in the German language and carries out a further qualitative analysis of two national newspapers as well as the central academic journal of the national SLA association. Results show that the use of multilingualism, but not multilingual, has become proportionately more common in written corpora since 2000. Second, multilingual and bilingual refer to partially different contexts. Finally, bilingual seems to be reserved for “two languages”, while the context of multilingual often remains unclear. The usefulness of seemingly rigid delineations on the basis of discrete features (number of languages or systems) for monolingual, bilingual and multilingual is questioned in view of the present usage of the terms.