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Having explored how official multilingualism has emerged as a product of historical and sociopolitical development, this chapter moves on to survey the extent of the phenomenon in the contemporary world. The data set offers a panoramic view of jurisdictions around the world that are officially bilingual or multilingual. Although there is not enough room to provide a detailed history of any particular jurisdiction, the chapter annotates the data and makes a number of generalized observations. The global data provide a sense of scale that speaks for itself and allow one to observe patterns and trends that help make sense of the phenomenon. Although linguistic demographics and the ideology of linguistic nationalism have a role to play, they are insufficient to explain the data. Official multilingualism is largely a post-colonial legacy, but there is also an emergent trend that official language policy responds to market forces under late capitalism.

This chapter analyses the complex language situation in Montenegro, focusing on the dialects and literary traditions, the debates surrounding the official language of Montenegro, and the characteristics of a separate Montenegrin language. The sociolinguistics of dialect geography and the literary traditions in Montenegro are described. The chapter also discusses the features of Montenegro's two factions, the neo-Vukovites and Nikcevic and his supporters. The merits of a proposed standard, including its new letters and new pronunciations and the expansion of ijekavian features, are shown. The future path of the Montenegrin language remains uncertain, and it is still unclear if and to what extent it will be accepted outside Montenegro's borders.

This chapter spells out major sociopolitical forces that have contributed to the widespread adoption of official multilingualism, and offers an explanation of how official multilingualism works through law. Jurisdictions that adopt multilingual law are primarily driven by pragmatic rather than normative forces. Official language law can perform a plethora of instrumental functions because such law works chiefly through its symbolic power. This discursive reading of law is contrary to the dominant, positivist view of law as command of a sovereign backed by force. Although symbolism is sometimes defined in opposition to what is real or substantive, law that works through symbolism is not necessarily empty in content or limited in impact. In fact, its semiotic flexibility has allowed it to be used to pursue a wide range of instrumental goals, which consist mostly of political and economic capital.

This concluding chapter provides some reflections on the lessons attained through the study of Rakuten's employees. The study reveals that a global company integrates its diverse and disparate pieces not only by specifying and adopting technical and organizational policies but also through the dynamic and evolving experiences that employees encounter as they meet the demands of global work. At the organizational level, a lingua franca can be a decoupling force between language and culture, and has the capacity to redistribute influence through a company in unforeseen ways. Most notably, an English-speaking Western culture is not necessarily always dominant in globalized organizations. An e-commerce giant like Rakuten that hails from an island country can forcefully assert its cultural identity. Of course, Rakuten's journey is still in process and there is no telling where it might lead. This study represents only a portion of what we can expect longitudinally when a globalizing organization makes a fundamental change to its official language.

The first step in evaluating and proposing an alternative to current EU Translation is determining which language version is and should be the original text and thus the “source text” for translation into the other language versions. Notwithstanding the rules and rhetoric of EU’s Institutional Multilingualism, English is in reality the language that participants in the EU legislative process use primarily to draft and debate EU legislation. Analogously, the Court of Justice of the EU appears to give more weight to a small number of widely used languages when interpreting EU legislation, particularly the English language version. Europe’s cultural diversity and EU’s democratic legitimacy demand that EU Institutions acknowledge this reality and accept English as the institutional and pan-European lingua franca. Moreover, they ought to formally recognize the English language version as the original and sole authentic legislative text, and thus as the source text in EU Translation.

The chapter is divided in three parts. The first describes the history of the main elements of the federal language policies then turns to the aggregate costs and benefits of the federal official language policy. The second presents the methodology used to allocate the benefits of the availability of French language services and their tax costs to households. The third presents the distribution for the population divided into ten deciles (income based) of the benefits and tax costs of OLA services linked to transfers to individuals and other services. The results combine information for 2001 and 2006 given the availability of data.

This chapter discusses the organization of operations and early evolution of the International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), paying attention to its structure, the leadership, the composition of the delegations, and its finances. The initial structure of the IASC was determined by the 1973 Agreement and Constitution. The Constitution was modified in 1977 and 1982, on the occasions of the international congresses of accountants in Munich and Mexico City, respectively. Reference is made to the impact of these constitutional changes. The 1982 Constitution was accompanied by a Mutual Commitments pact between the IASC and the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), which contained several important provisions bearing on the organization of the IASC.

This chapter addresses Article XXX of the Oklahoma constitution, which concerns the official actions of the state of Oklahoma. This article was adopted at an election held on November 2, 2010, making English the state’s official language. Supporters of such measures commonly argued it would ultimately increase the incentive for immigrants to learn English and assimilate and succeed in the United States, and would reduce budgetary pressures on the state. This provision does not prohibit private individuals and businesses from using whatever language they choose. It only affects official government business of the state of Oklahoma. In 2014, Oklahoma’s Court of Civil appeals upheld the article, concluding there is “no federal law requiring that Oklahoma’s Implied Consent Advisory [in the context of driving under the influence] be given in any language other than English.”

This chapter discusses the difficult position of the Arabic language from the point of view of the ‘volatile conditions’ of Arab citizenship in Israel. Azmi Bishara’s political career is a good example of the limits of citizenship for the Arabs in Israel. The chapter also discusses the meaning of ‘official’ languages, the role of language academies, the language arrangement in bilingual schools, and lastly the new imagined nationality of ‘Aramean’ and its genealogical connection to Aramaic. This new identity is in line with the state’s continuous attempts to fracture the Palestinian community in Israel, but at the same time it is drawing inspiration from the fragmentation of Arab communities in surrounding states such as Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

This chapter provides an overview of the emergence of Coptic as the written form of Egyptian language. As is well known, a consequence of the Graeco-Macedonian conquest of Egypt and the establishment of the Ptolemaic Dynasty was the institution of Greek as the official language. This situation remained unchanged when Egypt came under Roman domination. Contrary to what was taking place elsewhere with other local languages in the provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Egyptian language was not granted official recognition or used in official contexts during the first three centuries of its history. It remained in the shadows of private relations. Therefore, an Egyptian exception exists. The chapter then looks at the appearance of Coptic literary and documentary texts. It also considers legal texts, which had long been subject to the monopoly of Greek.

Palestinian poet laureate, Mahmoud Darwish writes that land is inherited like language. Most accounts of Arabs in Israel focus on the lost inheritance of Arab lands. This book investigates the problematic place of the Arabic language in Israel. While Arabic is an official language of Israel, according to a law which goes back to the year 1922, during the British Mandate, it is at the same time the language of the ‘Arab’ enemies surrounding and infiltrating Israel, the language of the Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 and who constitute today about 20 per cent of the total population, and also the language of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It is, moreover, the language of a dwindling number of speakers from the Mizrachi Jewish community. How are these seemingly contradictory positions of Arabic resolved, and what space is given to Arabic in the state? That is what this book is trying to answer.

More than means of communication, languages are integral parts of our cultural identities and feature frequently in intercultural conflict. Language policy has been a thorny issue in federal-territorial relations since the early twentieth century. There is a hallowed place for the Spanish language in Puerto Rican identity. At the same time, Puerto Ricans view English as a critical tool for upward mobility. The tug-of-war between the heart and wallet meant that most Puerto Ricans accepted official bilingualism. Then suddenly, in 1991, the island’s government declared Spanish its only official language. Political expediency was not the point. After all, it was not a popular move. Rather, the political operatives pushing this shift in language policy were involved in a complex game bypassing votes for a much larger political prize.

This chapter shows the diversity of interpretations of the concept of Pakistan as discussed and debated by Bengalis, from 1944, through and including the political changes of 1947. Through an analysis of literary and cultural institutions established by the new state, it investigates how the ideals behind Pakistan were interpreted in the new world of nation-states in the new context of East Pakistan. It also contrasts the continuity of literary cultures in the new state of Pakistan with the political upheaval and contravention of the ideals of the Pakistan concept that occurred in the initial years of the new post-colonial state. The analysis ends at 1952 with the inauguration of the ‘language movement’, a political movement to establish recognition of Bengali as an official language of Pakistan.

Léopold Sédar Senghor grew up in French West Africa, studied in France, became a French citizen, and, against his will, the first President of an independent Senegal. He embodied the tensions and contradictions of decolonization, especially in regard to language policy. In France, he was a member of the Negritude movement to promote recognition of African languages and culture, and in Senegal he became a founding member of Francophonie to promote French as the language of universal civilization. He made French Senegal’s official language, while designating some major indigenous languages as national languages. This chapter explains how the vagaries of his biography shaped his ideas about language and the language policy of his country.

The concluding chapter ties together the analyses of the official language of the Cuban Revolution for over six decades. It reflects on how the discursive perpetuation of the guerrilla ethos therein contributed not only to the survival of the Revolution itself but also to the part it has played in enabling the veterans of the sierra to maintain their political control over the revolutionary project since 1959. The chapter also highlights the different functions of guerrillerismo at different points in the revolutionary trajectory. In so doing, it asks whether a guerrilla rhetoric, which borrows heavily from Che Guevara’s writings, has enabled the Revolution to adapt and transform over time while appearing to remain true to its founding principles. Finally, the historic handover of power to Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2018 raises this question: how long can a guerrilla discourse sustain a Revolution whose leaders did not participate in the armed struggle that brought it to power?