Christiane Fäcke, Xuesong (Andy) Gao & Paula Garrett-Rucks (eds.) (2025): The Handbook of Plurilingual and Intercultural Language Learning. Chichester: Blackwell-Wiley.

The publication of handbooks must represent a thriving business for international academic publishing houses judging by the immense volume of such texts available for many disciplines, including linguistics. Whereas earlier handbooks tended to focus on an ‘entire’ discipline, such as Applied Linguistics, or larger subdisciplines, such as Pragmatics, Second Language Acquisition, current ones are more specialised focusing on a (sub)theme, topic or approach. This is in tune with the development in all branches of linguistics (or any other discipline) which is characterised by increased diversification and specialisation. The Handbook of Plurilingual and Intercultural Language Learning [henceforth, HBPILL] falls into this latter category. The main purpose of handbooks is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of a specific discipline or field that is both attractive to an expert readership and accessible to an audience new or less familiar with the field in question. For more specialist handbooks, there are additional challenges. There is a need to avoid or, at least minimise, overlaps with previous more general handbooks as these may already include papers on the more specialist topic or theme. Another one concerns the greater difficulty to ensure that the texts in this specific area remain accessible to a less specialist audience. I believe that the HBPILL editors were well aware of this and have managed to navigate this reasonably well through a clear structuring of the handbook into four major sections. These touch upon the main issues that are key to delving into and understanding the theory and practice of plurilingual and intercultural learning.