Abstract/Summary

This paper investigates public discourses of multilingualism in Britain. In contrast to previous research that focused on specific varieties, we examine multilingualism as a metalinguistic construct and are interested in what is frequently said about multilingualism. More specifically, we explore the extent to which media discourses are consonant or diverge from the attitudes of lay people. Media discourses are investigated using a corpus-assisted discourse study approach and large press corpora. Results from the corpus study were incorporated in an attitude survey distributed to 200 participants living in a larger town in Britain. Our study shows that while positive media discourses were mostly shared by the general public, some of the negative themes, especially related to immigration, were challenged. Our study shows the usefulness of triangulating corpus-linguistic methods with a survey to provide a more comprehensive understanding of public discourses about language matters and offers implications for promoting multilingualism in society.