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Verbal communication involving more than one language is widespread, both historically and geographically. This chapter provides an overview of multilingual 'regimes' of communication, covering different phenomena such as lingua franca communication or receptive multilingualism. The chapter discusses the consequences of multilingual language use as an institutionalized pattern for individual speakers' linguistic repertoires (e.g., learner varieties in a second language) as well as the consequences of individual multilingualism for collective patterns (e.g., language change due to language contact). Furthermore, research on the consequences that bi-and multilingualism can have on cognition is discussed, covering issues such as the potential impact of bilingualism on intelligence, on cognitive control, and the assumed influence of using a particular language on speakers' 'views of the world'. This latter topic is an important part in the ideological underpinnings of current language policies. Thus, in the concluding sections of the chapter, ideological and evaluative components of multilingual language policies are discussed.

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Research on politeness has been proliferating for nearly four decades now, drawing on crosslinguistic data from a wide range of spoken and written languages and focusing on pragmatic, syntactic and grammatical features. Speech acts such as apologies and requests have been investigated as well as grammatical, i.e. morphological, morphosyntactic, and lexical forms of honorific systems, expressions of politeness, respect and disrespect. However, while discussions and research centering on the notion of face have been exceptionally numerous, the grammatical category of respect has not yet received as much attention, since Haase (1994), with the exception of Simon (2003). The present collection on "Respect and the 3rd person: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Respect and Politeness" originated in the discussions in our panel at the DGfS annual meeting in 2009 on "Forms of expressing politeness / respect in discourse: Talking about a third party in different languages and varieties". The articles comprising this volume strive to expand our insights into the complex intersection between grammatical respect (i.e. linguistic features in morphology and/or morphosyntax), lexical expressions and discourse phenomena of politeness cross-linguistically, with special regard to the treatment of third-person non-participants and bystanders. Our aim is to shed new light on respect and politeness phenomena as well as on the relation between respect as a systematic category on the one hand and politeness as an outcome of linguistic interaction on the other.

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