Bilingualism

The contributors to this volume provide 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 twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They attempt 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" as a wide variety of sets of sociolinguistic practices connected to the construction of social difference and of social inequality under specific historical conditions.

The contributors to this volume provide 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 twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They attempt 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" as a wide variety of sets of sociolinguistic practices connected to the construction of social difference and of social inequality under specific historical conditions.

MONICA HELLER is Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Her major publications in the field of bilingualism include Codeswitching: Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives; Linguistic Minorities and Modernity: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography; Voices of Authority: Education and Linguistic Difference (edited with Marilyn Martin-Jones) and most recently Discours et identitiés. La francité canadienne entre modernité et mondialisation (edited with Normand Labrie).