Internationalization of higher education, mobility, and multilingualism

As preconditions and consequences of internationalisation of higher education, mobility and connectedness have reconfigured the manner, scale, and extent of language contact—and of additional language learning—in the contemporary world. Multilingualism is indispensable for the processes of internationalisation as a global industry, but a parallel monolingual ideology has installed English as the de facto language of internationalised education and scholarly interaction. This multilingual/monolingual co-dependency provokes a variety of responses as dominant and local languages interact in diverse internationalised university settings in a competitive global market. This chapter provides a sketch of types of mobility and dynamic linguistic ecologies that characterise internationalised education, and introduces the issues that have provoked the chapters in the remainder of this volume. The perspectives they present on diverse and contentious dimensions of internationalisation, such as national and institutional policy settings, medium of instruction, epistemic diversity, deployment of languages to achieve local objectives in contexts of mobility, responses of local language communities, as well as implications for multilingual practices, are outlined.