Will Tuladhar-DouglasNov 19, 2022

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.

Show threadWill Tuladhar-Douglas
...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.
Nov 19, 2022 at 9:35amWeb
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.