18 - Afterword

Summary

Recent assertions about ‘post-multilingualism’ (Li Wei 2016, 2018) are based on the growing body of work in what may be called the ‘4T’ approach or perspective: translanguaging, transmodal, transindividual, transspecies. If this is seen as superseding multilingualist approaches, such a subtractive development stands to impoverish understanding of language use. This chapter argues for them instead to be conceived of in an additive, complementary way – not in opposition to one another, but in joint use to provide as strong as possible an alternative to deeply rooted views concerning purported disadvantages of multilingualism and the erasure of its existence in various areas of linguistic research.