Introduction

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the impact of globalisation and new technologies has seen previously isolated linguistic groups come into increasing contact with each other. This has led applied linguists concerned with linguistic diversity and multilingualism to shift away from associating the term multilingual with an “enumerative strategy of counting languages and romanticising a plurality based on these putative language counts” (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007, p. 16). Instead of thinking about languages in additive, discrete systems where we have distinct cognitive compartments for separate languages with different competencies for each (see de Jong, 2011; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007 on the ‘collateral damage’ such embedded notions of language may be perpetrating), languages are thought of as always in contact with and mutually influencing each other, always open to renegotiation and reconstruction, and as mobile resources that are appropriated by people for their purposes (Canagarajah, 2013, pp. 6–7). Thus, increasingly, researchers do not start with languages in language studies but with people, translingual practices, places and spaces where communication transcends both “individual languages” and words, thus involving “diverse semiotic resources and ecological affordances” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 6). This proliferation of new ways of conceptualising linguistic diversity has resulted in the Council of Europe and scholars such as Moore (2006) and Piccardo (2013) drawing a distinction between the terms “multilingualism” and “plurilingualism”. While the term “multilingualism” denotes several different languages co-existing in a given physical location or social context, the term “plurilingualism” accounts for the ways in which individuals’ linguistic repertories overlap and intersect and develop in different ways with respect to languages, dialects and registers. Thus, 2while multilingualism is “the study of societal contact”, plurilingualism allows us to study the individual’s repertoires and agency in several languages (Moore & Gajo, 2009, p. 138).