Throughout the world, French stands alongside a variety of other languages, often existing uneasily within complex multilingual societies. Scholars approach these language contact situations in various ways. Some look at language contact at the societal level to analyze phenomena such as language shift or the creation of new languages. Others focus more on the individual level to investigate how speakers use multiple languages in their linguistic repertoire such as through borrowing, code-switching, or translanguaging. Through a historical and present-day perspective, this chapter explores typologies of contact situations and their outcomes as well as typologies of multilingual practices before delving into two case studies of multilingualism in the Francophone world.