Multilingual societies

Today's societies are characterized by mobility and, as a consequence, by different forms of multilingualism, spanning from what Blommaert calls “multilingualism of the poor” to “elite multi-lingualism”. From the linguistic perspectives covered by the Labex ASLAN research, multilingualism in societies has been dealt with in various fields and according to various methodologies. In the field of development and school education first of all, multilingualism can be examined at the stage of foreign language acquisition by children, and at that of the loss of the previously known foreign language by elderly people suffering from Alzheimer’s. In this cross-cutting theme, we can also study multilingualism on the basis of teaching French as a Foreign Language and in the field of education and multilingualism (in order to deal with problem of the construction of disciplinary knowledge and linguistic knowledge in second and foreign languages, for example). Multilingualism has also been studied as a consequence of migration.