Now that we're on the topic of language, here's an article to read about multilingualism, or the lack thereof, in America.Now for a joke:
What do you call someone who speaks four languages?
Multilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language?
American.
3 comments:
Americans: ignorant fools or contingent cosmopolites?
Maybe multilingualism is dying and the internet is the new tower of Babel; years from now we'll laugh at the silly notion that there was more than one language. The Euro killed national currencies. Languages next?
There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, but, last I knew, about half are danger of dying. So, maybe given a thousand years or so, we'll be down to a couple hundred.
According to the way my field (psycholinguistics) thinks about language, a language is a language is a language. Essentially, there are no real, deep, fundamental differences between them - we all speak a dialect of Humanese. But, traditional linguists, and especially sociolinguists, probably wouldn't see it that way. They'd argue that part of human culture and history was dying with each dying language.
I see both sides - language is the backbone of culture, but when it really comes down to it, we're all talking about the same things in the same way.
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