The contributors to this volume provide a critical examination of the notion of bilingualism as it has developed in linguistics and of its use in discourses of social regulation in state and civil society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They attempt to move the field away from a "common sense," but in fact highly ideologized, view of bilingualism as the co-existence of two linguistic systems, and to develop a critical perspective which approaches "bilingualism" as a wide variety of sets of sociolinguistic practices connected to the construction of social difference and of social inequality under specific historical conditions.

Bilingualism as ideology and practice / Monica Heller -- Bilingualism : colonialism and postcolonialism / Christopher Stroud -- Minority language movements / Alexandra Jaffe -- Bilingualism and the nation-state in the post-national era / Joan Pujolar -- Beyond the nation-state : international agencies as new sites of discourses on bilingualism / Shaylih Muehlmann and Alexandre Duchêne -- Language endangerment, language rights and indigeneity / Donna Patrick -- Language, migration and citizenship : new challenges in the regulation of bilingualism / Melissa G. Moyer and Luisa Martín Rojo -- Bilingualism, education and the regulation of access to language resources / Marilyn Martin-Jones-- Bilingualism and the globalized new economy : the commodification of language and identity / Emanuel da Silva, Mireille McLaughlin and Mary Richards -- Bilingualism in the mass media and on the internet / Jannis Androutsopoulos -- Language socialization and the (re)production of bilingual subjectivities / Paul B. Garrett -- Heteroglossia and boundaries / Benjamin Bailey -- Bilingualism, praxis and linguistic description / Lukas D. Tsitsipis -- Bilingualism and the analysis of talk at work : code-switching as a resource for the organizaton of action and interaction / Lorenza Mondada -- The monolingual bias in bilingualism research, or : why bilingual talk is (still) a challenge for linguistics / Peter Auer -- The future of 'bilingualism' / Monica Heller -- Postface : Politique et idéologie : la cas du bilinguisme / Andrée Tabouret-Keller -- English summary of Tabouret-Keller's Postface politics and ideology : the case of bilingualism.