The title of this chapter points to the frequent use of the word ‘we’ in Brexit discourse before and after the referendum. The pronoun ‘we’ in Brexitspeak almost always serves the exclusion of other nations or those in the domestic arena perceived as enemies of ‘the people’. Three different cases of the uses of ‘we’ are examined, each of which in their different ways shows how ‘we’ expressed an exclusionary notion of national identity. One of these cases shows how Brexitspeak persisted in the years after the referendum, and included the long-standing idea, at all levels of society, that ‘we’ speak only English. The second case is the 2013 speech by the then prime minister David Cameron, who favoured remaining in the EU. That speech, which announced the referendum, was apparently intended to placate the Eurosceptics and neutralise UKIP’s attractiveness. The speech repeatedly used ‘we’, embedded in an exceptionalist narrative of British greatness. Cameron’s speech failed in its aims and in fact boosted national-populist discourse. It was in tune with Farage’s own speeches of the same year, which is the third case of Brexiter ‘we’ examined in this chapter.

Peru is a multiethnic society whose postcolonial language regime was marked by the dominance of Spanish as the exclusive language of state bureaucracy up until recently. There are now forty-eight different Indigenous languages recognized by the state. The process of language regime transformation in Peru started with state traditions of monolingualism by defect, followed by incremental change in state recognition of Indigenous languages and the subsequent development of Indigenous language rights as manifested in constitutional and legislative norms. The adoption of a multilingual language regime based on linguistic rights for minorities was not the product of the Indigenous movement´s actions, nor those of ethnic parties. Institutional reforms that were not designed, and were not expected, to advance linguistic rights, allowed some actors the framework to accelerate incremental change.

In the 21st century, voluntary and increasingly forced migration has brought about linguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and religious diversity that continues to enrich educational settings. Australian early childhood centres and schools, like many others around the world, are increasingly comprised of teachers and young people who speak multiple languages and dialects, and who connect to and interact with diverse cultures and traditions within a range of new and evolving spaces. Yet in English speaking countries in the global north and south there is a persistent and widespread adherence to a monocultural, monolingual orientation ‘English-only’ approach. This comprises of placing emphasis on knowledge created in and communicated through English only. This orientation has a significant influence on inclusion and engagement for all young people and the ways educators teach and students learn across educational contexts.

This chapter addresses the shift from multilingualism to monolingualism associated with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a general overview of the linguistic conditions in the Ottoman lands, briefly surveying the historical dimensions of linguistic interactions reflecting the ebb and flow of Ottoman expansion and contraction, including the Westward movement of Turkic speakers into the central Islamicate lands and Anatolia from the eleventh century, the expansion of Ottoman rule into the Balkans from the fourteenth century, and the influx of Muslim refugees into the shrinking borders of the Empire as a result of military defeats and ethnic cleansing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter then focuses on three main factors affecting linguistic interactions in the Ottoman lands: (a) the inherently multilingual nature of Ottoman Turkish as an amalgam of three languages, namely, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; (b) the lived linguistic experience in the Empire, including the lack of a clear correlation between ethnicity, religion, and mother tongue, e.g., large numbers of Armenians, Turks, and Greeks, whose first language was not, respectively, Armenian, Turkish, or Greek, and; (c) the ways in which the advent of nationalism and Western influence affected the linguistic scene in such a diverse and demographically mixed Empire. The chapter ends by considering post-Ottoman language policies and the monolingual orientation of the modern nation-state. The tensions between the two are often revealed when signs of the multilingual past emerge to disturb the monolingual assumptions of the modern, read “national,” era.

The first chapter provides an introduction to the field of multilingual development explaining its scientific and societal relevance. The discussion begins with an overview of current globalization and migration processes where, based on OECD data of the past ten years, international migration streams receive illustration and substantiation. Case studies of prominent urban areas include London, Hamburg, Toronto, Vancouver, New York City, San Francisco, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Multilingualism, as such, is not a new phenomenon and may be considered a defining condition of the human species. However, the speed with which it keeps spreading and the density that it developed in urban areas are relatively recent phenomena without historical precedents. These processes are not universal, though. While the Western World appears to have rediscovered multilingualism after a long period of pervasive monolingualism, China currently appears on its way towards a form of social organization in which monolingualism and homogeneity are of paramount importance. The chapter further addresses the social hierarchy of languages and the special role of English in it.

Institutions play an important role in the management of multilingualism and can have a defining impact on language use. By granting more or less official status to certain forms of expression and language varieties, institutions legitimize some forms and varieties as more desirable targets of linguistic accommodation than others, which can affect speakers’ dominant language environments and influence the selection process of language change. This chapter outlines a socio-political approach to language standardization and interprets selected language policy and planning measures in terms of common mechanisms and outcomes of language contact in three western European states: France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Using the same historical timeline, it proposes a comparison of the circumstances under which national identities emerged in early modern and modern times, state boundaries were expanded through conquest, and more or less cultural homogeneity was achieved and enforced through language use. It is argued that even though ethnolinguistic diversity decreased considerably over time, different institutional responses to multilingualism led to different state-specific compromises that continue to shape language policies and planning in each of the three states today.

The roles language played in shaping and articulating one’s identity in Greco-Roman and Jewish antiquity constitute a backdrop against which the new developments attested in early Christianity can be measured. The ways in which foreign language speakers appeared in the Jewish Bible and Classical literature provided tropes, references, and allusions widely employed by early Christian authors. The chapter starts with an analysis of ancient Greek literary, historical, and philosophical compositions, from Homer to Aristotle, and investigates why the thought universe of the Classical Greek literati was virtually monolingual. It then proceeds to an overview of developments in the Hellenistic and early Roman eras and traces how the monolingual antiquity of Classical Greece gradually became the bilingual universe of the Roman empire, where Latin always shared its prestigious status as a vehicle of culture with Greek. The final section focuses on how early Jewish traditions depicted foreign languages and their speakers and how this culture adapted multilingual self-expression. In the conclusion, we discuss why language was rarely a decisive factor of group identity in these cultures and problematize the idea that the presence of linguistic differences by itself is a sufficient factor to trigger the processes of identity consolidation and objectification.

Chapter 4 acknowledges that even when we are successful at re-enchanting multilingualism, dis-alienating ourselves from “linguanomics” (Hogan-Brun 2017), and delinking from lingualism, monolingualism will nonetheless remain powerful in various forms and intensities, and many of us will remain responsible for its sedimented historical effects on people in our midst. The chapter wagers that the period from now until 2040 constitutes the remainder of what I consider to be an era of late mono/lingualism, a period we might date to the 1948 ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris (Kellman 2016). With more than 600 legally equivalent linguistic versions, the UDHR was an unprecedentedly “omnilingual aspiration” (ibid), which garnered criticism for overreach from Saudi and Iranian spokespeople at the time, as well as from the American Anthropological Association. Such omnilingual ambitions intensified in the 1970s and 1980s with customs deregulation and the implementational phase of neoliberal economic policy, and saw a chaotic, asymptotal boom in the 1990s with algorithmic corpus-driven Machine Translation.

The chapter provides an overview of the ways in which English has existed within a framework of multilingualism in all countries where it is spoken. The first part considers English beyond the shores of Britain, where it was initially introduced to contexts in which indigenous populations and their languages already existed, such as America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Later, as English was introduced to countries in Africa and Asia that were colonized by the British, such as Nigeria and India, it added to the multilingual patterns that already existed in those places. English has continued to rise in importance in countries that have no links to a colonial history or where it has no official function; this is often linked to processes of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In these countries, English is often part of an individual’s multilingual repertoire. The chapter finally returns to Britain, where the myth of English monolingualism probably persists the most. Both historical and modern-day multilingualism are discussed and a case study is presented to demonstrate how multilingualism has impacted on the English variety spoken in London today.