Othering of multilinguals in linguistics: Implications from labelling

As a result of European nation-state building, societies in the Global North tend to be dominated by a monolingual and monoethnic habitus that constructs multilingual speakers as members of an out-group. Labelling practices in academic publications reveal that such Othering patterns are not restricted to public or ``lay'' discourse. An analysis of Othering through labelling in published work from linguistics and related fields of sociology and education reveals recurring topoi that feed into three interrelated strands of Othering: Othering with respect to territorial belonging, to national group membership, and to linguistic ownership. These strands mirror the ideological nexus of ``one country, one nation, one language'' in larger society. Examples come from publications across different perspectives, subdisciplines, and research domains, underlining how widespread such practices are in our field. I argue that avoiding such Othering is not only important from the point of view of scholarly terminology, but also for our research perspective: if multilinguals are constructed as Others, this can lead to an implicit bias with negative effects on our research.