This handbook is organized around linguistic and cultural plurality. The French concept of \uab plurality \ubb has different political connotations than the Angloamerican term \uab diversity \ubb. While \uab diversity \ubb is the ideal of a neo-liberal democracy, \uab plurality \ubb is the ideal of a republican society committed to the tenets of the French
Revolution. Following Bourdieu (1977), it defines language as an \uab instrument of action (or of power) \ubb and aims to reconstruct the complexity of social and linguistic practices that constitute our relationship to the foreign. Plurality here is not defined as the mere coexistence of various languages, but rather as a specific social activity
characterized by the circulation of values across borders, the negotiation of identities, and the inversions\u2013indeed, the inventions\u2013of meaning that are often masked by the shared illusion of successful communication.
Plurality is approached in this book:
- as a complex aggregate, rather than as the simplified object of a communicatively oriented language pedagogy primarily concerned with intelligibility
- as a coherent system of relationships whose description cannot be reduced to a series of mechanical operations
- as a socio-historical construct, observable from many simultaneous, spatiotemporal points of view, such as that of everyday interactions or that of institutions whose symbolic force cannot be accounted for from one point of view alone
