Language and languages in institutions and multilingual societies

Institutions - from schools to authorities and organisations to health care - represent social apparatuses that have the potential to implement multilingual practices or to perpetuate monolingual practices. Since the late 1970s, functional-pragmatic language and communication analysis, or functional pragmatics (FP) for short, has been investigating linguistic action in multilingual societies and their institutions. Developed by Konrad Ehlich and Jochen Rehbein as an integral theory of language action, functional-pragmatic questions and analyses have developed in many ways and across language boundaries. The articles in this anthology lead from the basic theoretical examination of institution and language use to various case studies and investigations that deal with language and multilingualism in different social and institutional contexts on the basis of functional-pragmatic insights and explore the meaning of FP in the context of other theoretical concepts.