ABSTRACT
Recently, a school superintendent in Arkansas refused a request to have foreign languages taught at secondary level; he said, ‘If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for you.’1 This is a rather unusual way to deny the value of other languages and-who knows?—the story may be apocryphal or, at least, heavily embroidered. The idea, however, that expansion of the linguistic repertoire is unnecessary remains common among speakers of ‘large’ languages. Equally common is ignorance of the scope of multilingualism, past and present, and of the powerful relationships between languages and all aspects of social and psychological life. One of my most basic aims in this book has been, simply, to provide information which might counteract such ignorance. From the initial presentation, in Chapter 2, there is a logical progression to the ramifications and implications of multilingualism: what problems and challenges for communication it creates, how and why languages compete, why the defence of languages is such a vital and enduring part of the story and so on.
