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The Documentary: The Superlinguists: Monolingual societies

Monolingual societies

23/07/2019 GMT

The Superlinguists

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Superlinguists, Monolingual societies

Is there even something sinister and oppressive to the idea of monolingualism?

Presenter Simon Calder is from Britain, where, on the surface, everyone speaks English. In Brazil everyone appears to speak Portuguese, in Russia, Russian. But scratch the surface, and other languages appear, and not just those of immigrants. Simon meets speakers of indigenous languages (like Welsh in Britain), of dialects (like Moselfrankish in Germany) and vernaculars (like African-American Vernacular English, in the US). These speakers all use the mainstream language every day, but code-switch to their variants, questioning whether their societies are monolingual. Is there even something sinister and oppressive to the idea of monolingualism? A tool to control, used by emperors on conquered peoples, and by governments on immigrants?

The Documentary: The Superlinguists

The people who speak many languages. How do they do it, and why?

Imagine speaking 10, 20, even 50 languages. Or living in a country where you have to speak three or four languages to get through your day. Simon Calder meets polyglots who love languages so much that they keep learning new ones. Could anyone do this? Simon gets the best tips for learning a new language. In multilingual countries – India and Luxembourg – people use several languages every day. How does that work? And do monolingual countries still exist?

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