ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the politics behind people's language choices in a bilingual community. It describes the extent of language diversity in the world and factors that give rise to bilingual societies. The chapter looks at a few of the world's multilingual countries and consider the ideological motivations behind national language policies. It shows how individual language choices are influenced by societal power structures and how bilingualism frequently serves as a precursor to monolingualism for language minority populations. Societal bilingualism is often a result of contact between two or more language groups that do not have the same numerical, economic, and political power. The Chapter discusses the role of national policies in deciding the language of education for the masses and dissuading some people from passing on their languages to their children. Learning a second language is often a matter of choice and individual preference for social majorities but a matter of survival for minority populations.
