**4. Current trends and issues of modern multilingualism**

It is commonly acknowledged how important language and communication are in the educational process. It has long been a subject of concern in the Englishspeaking world. The famous Bullock Report (A Language for Life) from 1975 asserted that language was more than just a school subject, but rather a road to learning across the curriculum. Language is used in every discipline to convey and acquire knowledge and understanding. Bullock put it this way: "Every teacher is a language instructor." The Bullock Report has had a huge impact on educators and policymakers in the English-speaking world. Multilingualism today differs from previous social linguistic arrangements in numerous ways. Ignoring the changes is like to stating that technology has remained constant throughout history since we still use the wheel, which was allegedly invented in the late Neolithic period. In the following sections, we'll look at the elements of postmodernity that are intimately linked to current language practises and the key features of current multilingualism.

In order to cope with multilingualism practically and intellectually, it is important to come to certain conclusions about whether multilingualism existed in the past or if it is a completely new occurrence. Consider the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and history to begin answering this question. Multilingualism, people believe, is a distinctively human trait that dates back thousands of years. Language is a trait that separates our species from others and plays a vital role in human evolution. To be sure, several languages have been spoken since the dawn of human interaction. Barnard [16] claims that with Homo sapiens and possibly Neanderthals, who had larger brains than Homo sapiens, "[m]ultilingualism was the norm, and multilingual peoples were made up of individuals from different linguistic backgrounds, whose groups intermarried and passed on both their genes and their linguistic diversity." Looking further back in time, we can see how the social nature of language and our beliefs about it fundamentally mirror stages of society evolution and organisation, with the latter altering depending on historical conditions (see **Table 1**).


#### **Table 1.**

*Stages of societal organisation and language patterns.*

The existence of human language was crucial in and of itself for the first communities, as shown in this table. Whether in the form of a proto-language or covering many diverse communication systems, it served humans as a tool of communication and cognition and distinguished humans from other creatures at the time.
