Experiencing Multilingualism — the Elderly Becoming Marginalized?

Abstract

Globalization and the multilingualism it brings along is lived reality for most people in the world, but how it touches different groups and how people experience it differ substantially: for some it provides opportunities and prosperity, for others it is an obstacle and threshold; it includes some but excludes others; for some it is a functional and useful everyday resource, others remain bystanders and face the threat of marginalization. As stated in Blommaert et al. (this volume), multilingualism is often cherished and connected to positive phenomena in society but its positive outcomes are not to be taken for granted. For some groups of people multilingualism may be a problem and it may cause them to become marginalized, at least in some spheres of life. For these groups multilingualism is something that takes place inevitably in their daily environment but they themselves remain bystanders and cannot take part in the development. It is precisely these bystanders that this chapter focuses on. The interest of this chapter lies in the consequences of multilingualism for individual subjects, namely the elderly. More specifically, this chapter examines how multilingualism poses a potential threat to this specific group, how it might endanger full participation in society and thus lead to exclusion and marginalization.