Multilingualism and Wellbeing

Multilingualism and Wellbeing is an innovative text that combines sociolinguistic, psychological, and philosophical approaches to explore multilingualism as a source of wellbeing. It challenges the ‘monolingual bias’ and the common assumption that multilingualism is solely driven by utilitarian, formal, or identity-based motivations.

Across nineteen carefully edited chapters, contributors illustrate the enduring vitality of multilingualism across the globe through personal and empirical accounts, investigating diverse motivations behind its persistence. Authors present compelling evidence for multilingualism’s positive impact on a person’s sense of mental, social, and cultural wellbeing. With a distinctive global reach, this volume showcases multilingual experiences from regions including West Africa, the Netherlands, Georgia, Japan, and Indonesia, while also examining governmental policies that promote multilingualism – despite the practical challenges involved – offering a nuanced and balanced perspective.

This ground-breaking work is essential reading for advanced students and researchers in multilingualism, language acquisition, language learning, and applied linguistics, as well as for those in related fields of sociology, psychology, and philosophy.

Dick Smakman works as a Sociolinguist for Leiden University, the Netherlands. This is his third co- edited volume, in which special attention is given to contributions on lesser- known sociolinguistic contexts, particularly those outside the Anglo- Western realm. The first two volumes in this series were Globalising Sociolinguistics: Challenging and Expanding Theory (Smakman & Heinrich, Routledge, 2015) and Urban Sociolinguistics: The City as a Linguistic Process and Experience (Smakman & Heinrich, Routledge, 2018).

Jemima Asabea Anderson is a Sociolinguist at the Department of English, University of Ghana, Legon.

Gladys Nyarko Ansah works as Associate Professor with the Department of English, University of Ghana. She is a cognitive/applied linguist with many research interests including the sociolinguistics of multilingualism. She co-authored a chapter on “A sociolinguistic mosaic of West Africa: challenges and prospects” in Smakman and Heinrich’s 2015 book Globalising Sociolinguistics: Challenges and Expanding Theory.