Global research on the historical conditions of the formation of multilingual societies

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The most productive definition of multilingual societies is the "functionally multilingual societies". We find functional discrimination between languages wherever exist two or more languages. The purpose of this research is to verify historically such multilingual functions and the formation of "functionally equal multilingual societies".This was the final research year so we tried to analyze globally to draw up a final report. We made a study conference in June in Tokyo, a 3 day research seminar in August in Toba-shi, Mie Prefecture. We hold an open research conference in Hitotsubashi University, at the beginning of December, in order to make global comparison.The theory and the practice of functionally equal multilingual societies are developing in EU, especially, in minority language areas, such as Wales and Catalonia, in this decade. In Africa or in South Asia, there are also many countries where legal protections of minority languages are progressing. But it cannot be said that minority groups in these areas are really protected by laws. In Japan, although we can see some progress about the recognition of the language and the culture of Okinawa and of Ainu, and the comparison of these cultures and those of the Korean people in Japan, and of the Japanese-Brazil, the legal protection still lags behind. Moreover, comparison on the global scale of overall theory about multilingual societies remains as a future project.