KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Immigration, Multilingualism, Multiculturalism, Multiliteracy Introduction

Abstract

An excerpt from the Introduction

Multilingualism and bilingualism are linguistic contexts involved with situations where languages come in contact. Bilingualism demonstrates a sociolinguistic situation where an individual or community speaks two languages or multilingualism, where an individual or nation/ community use more than two languages. These two sociolinguistic situations are usually associated with immigration.

There is a misconception that the nations of the West are monolingual and that the countries of the Third World (Asia, Latin America, Africa) are the ones riddled with multiple languages and dialects, thereby rendering them multilingual. Nothing could be far from the truth. The United States of America is only monolingual at the Federal level. It is multilingual at the State and local levels, English and Spanish in California, New Mexico, and so on. In Britain, there exist regional dialects that are not inter-intelligible. Before the arrival of migrants and refugees in the second half of the 20^th century in Britain, Britain was already multilingual. It was only metaphorically monolingual like France, Germany, US, and many more, as they claim.