Introduction

Abstract

Some musings on multilingualism and the rationale behind this special issueToday multilingualism (re-)appears as a fundamental condition and aim of learning as well as the use of languages in education and in multiple other contexts.Present scholarly contributions rarely link up with historical multilingualism.Investigations into multilingualism in the past are, however, insightful and highly relevant.Let us take Mary Louise Pratt's prominent discussion of the Guaman Poma's New Chronicle and Good Government from 1613 (Pratt, 1991) or Rindler Schjerve's volume on language policy in the 19th century Habsburg Empire as an example (Rindler Schjerve, 2003).Among many other insights, these works remind us that multilingualism is neither a recent phenomenon, nor a characteristic restricted to modern globalized societies.Multilingualism, in its widest sense, is and has always been a fundamental feature of human life in society.We would like to point out two implications of this observation: First, the study of language cannot be separated from the conditions of human life.The opposite also holds true: social research cannot ignore language.Second, the insights from historical multilingualism re-confirm that research in multilingualism brings out big issues of humanity such as power, equity, or identity.This comes to the forefront even more when the context is education, since the distribution of chances for a good (or better) life and access to resources is closely related to education.Hence, it comes as no surprise that research into multilingualism and education is particularly prolific.There is an impressive number of recent publications that stimulate the field and inspire new questions (e.g.Man Chu Lau & Van Viegen, 2020;Tian et al., 2020 or Sànchez & García, 2021 in the field of translanguaging) or reaffirm decades of previous research (e.g.Cummins, 2021).Even these few examples show an important fact about the state of multilingualism research: knowledge about the complexities of multilingual learning and teaching has increased tremendously.Moreover, research has provided

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