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mono-lingualism is curable
Robert Phillipson author of Linguistic Imperialism, (1992) wrote me in an
e-mail the following:
>>
My wife (Tove Skutnabb-Kangas) has told me that in bilingual
education circles in California a popular T-shirt proclaimed "blessed
with bilingual brains". And once when she was lecturing about the
joys of multilingualism, some participants went out and had a T-shirt
made for her with the inscirption "I do not suffer from monolingual
stupidity". Likewise the phrase "monolingualism is curable" is also
becoming popular.
<<
I see this little story as significant in the struggle over linguistic
pluralism. Bi-lingual and multi-lingual situations are rather the norm
and not the exception around the world. In fact a mono-lingual context is
rather the result of severe linguistic politics and a part of European's
modernism.
I am very curious to read more about this fact.