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Lingua franca communication in multiethnic contexts 207

3.2. Language policy and intercultural communication in
multilingual settings

Societal multilingualism has many reasons. Recently, increased migration has
led to a mixture of cultures and languages within nations which had previously
8
been conceived as being largely monolingual , e.g. Iceland. Originally, such
countries had established their political boundaries such as to comprise basi-
cally one speech community, often confined by geographical boundaries such as
the sea in the case of Iceland, or rivers and mountains in many other cases. How-
ever, the historical development of numerous countries was such as to event-
ually involve the integration of more than one speech community within one
nation. A selection of these is listed in table 1.

Table 1. Language use in a selection of multilingual nations
country living national official
languages language(s) language(s)
Australia 231 English English
Canada 85 English, French English, French
India 415 Hindi Hindi, English, Bengali,
Telugu, Marathi, Tamil,
Urdu, Gujarati, Malaya-
lam, Kannada, Oriya,
Punjabi, Assamese,
Kashmiri, Sindhi, and
Sanskrit
Nigeria 510 Edo, Efik, Adamawa Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba,
Fulfulde, Hausa, English
Idoma, Igbo, Central
Kanuri, Yoruba,
English
Switzerland 12 French, German, French, German, Italian
Italian, Romansh

Multilingualism in the individual countries listed in the table has different rea-
sons depending on the socio-historic circumstances of the individual nation’s
course of foundation. But all the nations face the problem of having to decide on
a language policy, determining which languages will be chosen to govern and
administer the country and to provide education to its citizens, but also to ac-
count for the multilingual society.