ABSTRACT
There are very few countries where the whole population has a common ethnic origin and speaks only one language. It would mean that these societies have developed in isolation with few contacts with other peoples, cultures and languages. To find examples of such countries in Europe we would need to look to the outer fringes of the continent, e.g. Iceland (Hoffman 1994). The normal situation both in Europe and in the rest of the world is that a country is multi-ethnic as well as multilingual. Through the centuries both peaceful and hostile contacts have been maintained between nations. Borders have been moved back and forth depending on who were the stronger militarily and for this reason today there are many different groups of people, cultures and languages represented within most nations. Another reason is the migration between countries which has taken place over the centuries and which has become even more common during recent decades. However, the fact that a country is multilingual does not necessarily mean that its inhabitants are all multilingual. In Sweden, like in many other countries, it is mostly the linguistic minorities, which have had to develop multilingualism to be able to handle contacts with the majority population, while the rest of the country has remained monolingual. Changes concerning these matters have taken place in later years, at least on an official level.
