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Course Description

Summary

Scholarly estimates consistently place the percentage of the world’s population able to communicate proficiently in more than one language over 50%.  Yet multilingual competence is regularly treated as a secondary or even aberrant state requiring explanation and interpretation, while monolingualism is assumed as default despite its numerically inferior status.  In this course, we will reverse this paradigm, and work to view monolingualism as a contingent output of an essentially multilingual human milieu. Perspectives will range from the sociolinguistic to the psycholinguistic to the realm of language ideology/policy, and our examination of individual and societal-level practices will address topics relating to language acquisition, language contact/isolation, code-switching, mono-/polylectalism and mono-/diglossia.  Participation of multilingual and monolingual students in the seminar is welcomed.