Michał B. Paradowski
Institute of Applied Linguistics,
University of Warsaw
Photo Credit: Anthony Kelley
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
— Charlemagne (742/7 – 814), King of the Franks
Multilingualism is the natural potential available to every normal human being rather than an unusual exception; it is only the environmental factors which may fail to provide the opportunity to learn another language that produce monolingual speakers: “Given the appropriate environment, two languages are as normal as two lungs” (Cook 2002b:23); “A theory purporting to account for universal language learnability cannot be considered adequate if it excludes the non-monolingual speakers of this world” (Satterfield 1999:137).
Multilingualism need not even require the ability to speak two unrelated languages; a user of e.g. the ‘literary’ and a vernacular/dialectal variety is already multicompetent, with today only “a handful of isolated pockets of ‘pure’ monolinguals, now hard to find even in the mountains of Papua New Guinea” (Cook 2002b:23). At the same time, multicompetence does not require perfect fluency in all the languages at one’s command; thus, setting the boundary would probably be a mission impossible. We might quote Michael Byram here, according to whose theory of intercultural competence fully mastering a TL is not advisable, as then the speaker loses his original perspective.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.Thomas Stearns Eliot (1922) The Waste Land (8;12)
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Whether we like it or not, the world of tomorrow will remain multilingual. Educating people to be multilingual is not only offering a reflection of the various socio-linguistic and socio-cultural realities, it is also a means of defending this diversity.
Do you know any established international conference in 2011 which is related to multilingualism ?
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