New Perspectives on Multilingualism in a Context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

New Perspectives on Multilingualism in a Context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

This paper is to examine four core factors of multilingualism in a context of diversity and convergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Era. Since multilingualism is the natural potential available to everyone without unusual exceptions, multilingualism should be an ideal model as the norm almost in every field including policies and educational practices. Together with Canadian bilingualism, glocalized multilingualism has recently been a trend that we cannot resist from the new perspective of diversity in response to the current environment. Especially in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, multilingualism should be a key concept for a natural development of the global society. Multilingualism including bilingualism is the best route which we have to follow cognitively, socially and linguistically. In this paper, new perspectives on the legitimacy of multilingualism are discussed with positive effects in terms of four factors in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: sustainability in glocalization, equity, World Englishes and machine translation.