Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. Second part of the book explores three kinds of multilingual educational settings—those involving Deaf, migrant and cross-border populations. The focus on the political nature of linguistic issues in specific Brazilian educational settings explores and clarifies the critical role that language ideologies, particularly monolingual nationalist ideology, can play in the reproduction of the ideological hegemony of a centralized state in specific local and national debates and policies. The theoretical and practical implications of the results of the studies presented in this part of the book are consistent with some fundamental findings and claims of previous research in contemporary multicultural and multilingual Western contexts, particularly with the general principle formulated by Blommaert and Verschueren at the end of the 1990s: "Language creates identity and discontinuity. It unites and it divides".