ABSTRACT
A superficial look at a map might suggest that the world is made up of monolingual blocks: in the west, the Anglo-Saxon countries; in the east, the mighty empires of China and what was the Soviet Union, with Spanish-speaking Central and South America flanked by yet more vast English-speaking territories in the shape of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and even India, where English is spoken by the ruling classes everywhere and is the major language of higher education. Yet appearances can be deceptive. Whilst large areas of the world officially proclaim themselves monolingual, in practice many of their inhabitants speak a variety of minority languages. Minorities generally speak more than one language and those who come into contact (in whatever fashion) with minority communities are increasingly called upon to speak more than one language themselves. In the United Kingdom, the motherland of English, large numbers of British citizens speak a huge variety of minority languages such as Urdu, Gujarati, Creole, Turkish, Italian and Welsh. Afro-Asian ‘community languages’ are spoken by rapidly growing numbers of people, a phenomenon paralleled by a process of ghettoization. In the United States, Spanish is the language making most rapid advances, whereas native Indian languages are gaining prominence in South America. The non-Russian peoples of the former Soviet Union are no longer willing to accept Russian as the dominant language. On the Indian subcontinent, ethnic and linguistic rivalry is on the increase, where Hindi and the Tamil languages are the major opponents and English-as a post-colonial bridge between these cultures-is not attacked. What will the linguistic map of South Africa look like once human rights can no longer be withheld from the black majority and major tribal languages become important ethnic and political factors? And how linguistically pure are those far-flung areas of white settlement (as seen from the traditional European perspective) such as Australia and New Zealand?
