Will Tuladhar-Douglas

Almost every conversation in our house is bi- or tri- lingual. At conferences, people flip back and forth across shared languages trying to find the right words, while referencing key terms in source languages. My Fedi instance feed runs in German, Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Greek, Catalan; my own feed includes Bangla, Mandarin, and Hindi. Research by anthropologists and historians suggests that most humans, through most of history, were #polyglot.

So when the "wow, it's bilingual" stuff starts circulating here on the Fedi it's a sure sign the monoglot-disabled community from the UK and USA have arrived as part of the twitter exodus.

Nov 19, 2022 at 9:32amWeb
Show threadWill Tuladhar-DouglasNov 19, 2022
...and yes, I do think one can make a case for being monoglot as a disability, albeit a social one imposed on children by nasty politics. It involves an acquired loss of innate function and creates severe communication and empathy deficits.
Show threadDiary of Paracelsus’s RoseNov 19, 2022
@yetiinabox I can see where you come from and I agree that monolinguism can be seen as an imposed condition that is rather recent a thing. But if it is a disability, it’s an exorbitant one. There are lots of us who simply cannot afford to be monoglot.
Show threadWill Tuladhar-DouglasNov 19, 2022
@zoec Oh I agree! It is a marker of extraordinary arrogance and structural domination at the *national* level, but it disprivileges families and individuals. This, sadly, is *precisely* the point of China's one language policy.
Show threadDiary of Paracelsus’s RoseNov 19, 2022

@yetiinabox Indeed, I’d say the policy also deprives the nation of the diversity essential for resilience.

Perhaps domination is fragile, partly because it is disabling.

Show threadPJ "Vote Green" CoffeyNov 20, 2022

@yetiinabox @zoec

Reminds me of a joke I used to tell my TEFL students.

What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual

What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual

What do you call someone who only speaks 1 language?

English.

Show threadDevanNov 19, 2022
@yetiinabox lol. this is such a euro-centric hot take. if you grow up in the vicinity of other languages, then you communicate in them. it's really that simple. there are many polyglots in the US in places with high concentrations of Spanish speakers. Europe just has a lot of language diversity in a (relatively) small space. Especially north-west Europe.
Show threadWill Tuladhar-DouglasNov 19, 2022
@dvn
I wish that were true. I have watched as being bilingual Mexican-English went from being a status marker for old Californian families to being an undesirable social marker unless you identify as Latinx.
Show threadAlvynNov 19, 2022
@yetiinabox wau that’s cool 👍
Show threadScott the F is implicit BaxterNov 19, 2022
@yetiinabox If folks didn't see their linguistic framework as the default norm, that would be nice.
Show threadAnne KlammtNov 20, 2022
@yetiinabox I agree with you on multilingual as common in former times. And even the standardization of "German" is a more recent thing. However, in Deutschland speaking also French, Mandarin, English, Spanish & Italian is most often a marker of social privileges. And instead being fluent in Turkish, Polish or Pashtu is perceived as part of one's Migrationshintergrund. So I wonder if we shouldn't foster instead of being multilingual the variety of voices.
Show threadWill Tuladhar-DouglasNov 20, 2022

@archaeoklammt
The multilingual in our family includes one large language, one Asian "national" language, and one Indigenous language with < 500,000 speakers and fewer every year.

I agree with you that, for each place there are language politics that create oppression. In Scotland, it would make sense to encourage polyglossia in Syrian Arabic, in Farsi, in Kurdish, in Albanian...as well as Scots and Gaelic...as well as Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Swedish, Bangla, Urdu...and in fact I work on projects that do this. But just getting the monoglots to see that monoglossia is both oppressive and also an unfreedom is hard when it is a marker of privilege.

And I wory desperately about #endangeredIndigenousLanguages like the one we speak at home. So much is lost when a language dies.

Show threadAnne KlammtNov 20, 2022
@yetiinabox merci et einverstanden!!
Show threadDebra StorrNov 20, 2022
@yetiinabox May I thank you for the term polyglot-disabled.
And yes, the U.K. is dedicated to the supremacy of English with attitudes in general to Gaelic, Welsh and Scots being condescending to dismissive.
Equal regard between languages is ‘foreign’.
Show threadTakingOffNov 20, 2022
@yetiinabox interesting, but it is certainly a mistake to believe that it is only (or mostly only) the US and the UK that are monoglots. Most people in Latin America, probably a majority in the Hindi belt, and many (most?) native speakers of Chinese are monolingual.