ABSTRACT
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language by a single individual or community. In the popular imagination and in linguistic theory, multilingualism is often assumed to be an anomalous, exceptional practice. The knowledge and use of a single language – monolingualism – has been taken as the natural human condition. Yet, both historically and currently, most of the world's communities and a majority of speakers are multilingual to a greater or lesser extent. The privileging of monolingualism as against multilingualism is due to the dominance of the European nation state, which has been legitimated by a monolingualist language ideology. This ideology – now taken for granted throughout the world – presumes that each ethnic group has a language of its own and by virtue of this difference deserves political autonomy. It imagines such exclusive groups, each with its own language and culture, to be distributed over the landscape in separate territories like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Linguistic knowledge, in this view, is an emblem of political belonging and thus multilingualism implies political unreliability or mixed loyalty. The biblical story of Babel suggests a much older distrust of multilingualism in the Western tradition. A single, universal language was seen as the gift of paradise, while linguistic diversity and hence the need for multilingualism were presented as divine punishment for human arrogance.
