Posts

Showing posts with the label multilingualism

Multilingualism, please!

I guess that by this point you've guessed that I am a language geek (among other types of geek). A week or so ago I was reading this opinion piece, titled Only English Spoken , on Inside Higher Ed. The author goes through a synopsis of historical liberal arts education, and the role that foreign languages played in it. The general view of the opinion piece (which you should read, by the way) is that if you are only monolingual you are denied access to a lot of inside knowledge. While a lot of information may be available in your native language (English for example in most cases in the US), and a lot of information is available in English (science and technology related information in my case), there is a corpus of knowledge both written and spoken that is not available in English and that knowledge is inaccessible if you don't know that language. I happen to agree with this point of view and I do agree that as college graduates from US universities we should be at least bi-...

Multilingualism and the economic crisis

Hot off the heels of my little rant (and recommendation) on LANG101/102 for high schools and universities, here is a fairly recent video blog from a linguist blog that I subscribe to. I thought it was interesting, it's worth 10 minutes :-)