ABSTRACT
Multilingualism is a reality for the majority of people. While language diversity is declining with every language death, the forces of globalization and migration create contexts in which the subjective perception is one of increased diversity, even so-called ‘superdiversity.’ Multilingual pragmatics also has implications for long-term changes in pragmatic norms and can impact changes in language structure. This chapter provides a selective overview of pragmatics research in multilingual communities, particularly in the Spanish-speaking world. We first present a brief review of multilingual phenomena, followed by their implications for pragmatics and identity. Within the latter, we pay particular attention to multilingual pragmatics in Spanish-speaking contexts. We also highlight methodological challenges for pragmatics research. The chapter emphasizes that multilingual people do not differ from monolingual people in terms of what they do, but rather in terms of the linguistic resources at their disposal.
