As people across the world become increasingly mobile, questions concerning bilingualism and multilingualism have taken on growing importance from both scholarly and practical points of view. The international circumstances that have developed over the last two decades - in which linguistic and ethnic communities that had previously been politically submerged have asserted themselves - have provided scholars with new opportunities to study the phenomena of individual and societal bilingualism and multilingualism. This timely reference volume explores these questions, discussing the meaning and influence of the phenomena and conceptualization of "hyperglobalization" in the field, and assessing the latest developments in worldwide linguistics, with particular emphasis on geographical centers of global conflict and commerce.

The first edition of The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism, which provided state-of-the-art overviews of the central issues of bilingualism, represented a new integration of interdisciplinary research by a team of internationally renowned scholars. The second edition now benefits from seven new chapters on topics ranging from global media to heritage language learning, and the addition of ten new authors to the contributor team. All but one of the chapters have been revised and in some cases rewritten to provide more extensive, updated overviews of bilingual and multilingual communities, polyglot aphasia, creolization, indigenization, linguistic ecology, endangered languages, multilingualism, and forensic linguistics. The result is a single-volume Handbook that will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students in linguistics, education, anthropology, and global studies.