The myth that schools must regulate writing starts as English shifts to schools (away from home instruction), and schools shift to English (away from classical languages). Its consequences include making English regulation common and desirable, and making language variation a threat. Diverse ways of writing persist, but they aren’ studied in school. Closer to the truth is that language diversity and language knowledge are human rights, but school writing focuses only on a narrow part of a continuum of common ways of writing.

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.

This introduction has three aims: (a) to discuss the causes of historic amnesia in the field of multilingualism; (b) to offer a brief survey of historic language management, defined here as explicit efforts to regulate the choice of languages and scripts and to facilitate communication in the public domain; and (c) to reconsider the relationship between past and present multilingualism and identify productive directions for future inquiry. I begin by listing the misconceptions that raised my interest in the history of multilingual societies. Then, I will discuss the paradoxes and contradictions of historic language management in six institutional domains: administration, courts of law, religion, army, education, and public signage. In the last section, I consider the big picture emerging from recent historic work. The opposite of what we have come to believe, this picture undermines the sense of contemporary exceptionalism and opens up space for new narratives and exciting avenues of pursuit.

The results of this study have implications for our theoretical linguistic models of native speaker knowledge, and to understanding the mechanisms of language acquisition, transmission, and diachronic language change. Implications for language policies and the education of minority language speakers in the United States are discussed.

Shelley K. Taylor recounts her impression, growing up in a multilingual city in Canada with multilingual parents, that everyone had their own ‘secret’ languages. While she has been a lifelong learner of languages, her journey reflects a blurring of boundaries between naturalistic and instructed Second Language Acquisition. Through her research on multilingual education navigating across different language families and global contexts, she challenges educators’ monolingual mindsets to promote students’ academic achievement and multilingual development.

The chapter sets out to critique and contextualise the largely monolingual language policies of universities in South Africa against the backdrop of transformation. The language question at higher education institutions in South Africa is explored with reference to the constitutional and legislative frameworks. The chapter argues that the trend towards enacting monolingual language policies at universities is mimicking the 2017 monolingual language of record directive for courts in South Africa. The chapter advances recent judgements, which serve as evidence that the judiciary, by finding that monolingual language policies are both constitutionally sound and ironically foster transformation based on access for all, is in fact pursuing an agenda that marginalises many people who do not have a functional knowledge of English. The authors grapple with the legal, sociopolitical and sociolinguistic complexities facing universities and how English is being portrayed as a language for all, yet the majority of the people speak an African language as their mother tongue. In conclusion, the authors propose recommendations for both the higher education institutions and the judiciary in South Africa.