I haven’t seen the book, but just judging from the description at the publisher’s page I thought Multilingualism and History, edited by Aneta Pavlenko, was worth a post:
We often hear that our world ‘is more multilingual than ever before’, but is it true? This book shatters that cliché. It is the first volume to shine light on the millennia-long history of multilingualism as a social, institutional and demographic phenomenon. Its fifteen chapters, written in clear, accessible language by prominent historians, classicists, and sociolinguists, span the period from the third century BC to the present day, and range from ancient Rome and Egypt to medieval London and Jerusalem, from Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires to modern Norway, Ukraine, and Spain. Going against the grain of traditional language histories, these thought-provoking case studies challenge stereotypical beliefs, foreground historic normativity of institutional multilingualism and language mixing, examine the transformation of polyglot societies into monolingual ones, and bring out the cognitive and affective dissonance in present-day orientations to multilingualism, where ‘celebrations of linguistic diversity’ coexist uneasily with creation of ‘language police’.
Some of the chapters of most interest to me: 2 – “Greek Meets Egyptian at the Temple Gate: Bilingual Papyri from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Third Century BCE–Fourth Century CE),” 6 – “Multilingualism and the Attitude toward French in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” 9 – “Language Ideology and Observation: Nineteenth-Century Scholars in Northwestern Siberia,” and 11 – “Multilingualism and the End of the Ottoman Empire: Language, Script, and the Quest for the ‘Modern’.” If anyone has actual experience with the book, I’ll be glad to hear about it.
We often hear that our world ‘is more multilingual than ever before’, but is it true?
I’m astonished to think that anybody could seriously suggest that it was true.
Do they also offer a tome demolishing the widespread myth that the world’s population has never been lower than it is now?
You sneer, but I’ve seen just such a sentiment repeated in god knows how many thinkpieces (by people who do not so much think as repeat the dubious ideas of others).
I’m already astonished by the casual claim that “we often hear” that. I never have.
This immediately reminds me of gigabytes of clickbait that asks “why do we enjoy” all sorts of things. Never mind that I don’t (it’s well established that I’m not terribly representative) – in most cases I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
I’ve seen just such a sentiment repeated in god knows how many thinkpieces
It is always chastening to be reminded of the fact that even the most elementary facts about language, familiar to all linguists*, just aren’t part of the “general knowledge” assumed by journalists and the like.
Still, you might have thought that even a PR drone at CUP would know something. Perhaps the snippet was actually produced by an APE.
* Even Chomskyans.
It is always chastening to be reminded of the fact that even the most elementary facts about language, familiar to all linguists, just aren’t part of the “general knowledge” assumed by journalists and the like.
It is indeed. And I’m afraid actual knowledge is probably a hindrance to the careers of PR drones.
Once upon a time, long away and far ago, I pursued a career in the academy. Following a study of a battle of footnotes between—if sixty year old memories can be trusted—Menéndez Pelayo and Menédez Pidal, and a stint as a copy editor at Modern Language Notes (a friendly ‘request’ from the department chair was understood to be a mandate), I left academe. I don’t miss the nounification and verbing of every part of speech.
“ these thought-provoking case studies challenge stereotypical beliefs, foreground historic normativity of institutional multilingualism and language mixing, examine the transformation of polyglot societies into monolingual ones, and bring out the cognitive and affective dissonance in present-day orientations to multilingualism…”
I learned something today. Foreground can be a verb. Oook! I must enroll in Unseen University before my brain withers.
OED, foreground v.:
M. Twain can hardly be accused of being academic.
It’s pretty well established as a technical term in linguistics, too (in relation to focus and suchlike phenomena.) Though usually as the gerund “foregrounding”, rather than as a finite verb,
Some things should be backgrounded, ignorance for example. And yet people are forever foregrounding it. Is this carelessness, or perhaps a List der Vernunft ?
gigabytes of clickbait that asks “why do we enjoy” …
There ought to be a linguistic term for this form of “we”. The ‘presumptuous first person’?
As DM says, I typically _don’t_ enjoy … Indeed very often I’ve not even heard of what it is I’m presumpted to enjoy.
(Was watching a Youtube from Rick Beato yesterday. He’s sometimes very good on music topics; no doubting he’s an accomplished player. But when he starts into “we’ve all heard the music from Star Wars, can hum the tunes even if we can’t hum any Bach tunes …” Grrrr!)
Foregrounding in 1855.
Foregrounding in 1855.
Wow! I’ve been wrong for going on 200 years.
“We often hear that our world ‘is more multilingual than ever before’, but is it true? This book shatters that cliché”
0 < "often"
I'm not sure what Aneta (if the annotation is by her, Aneta Pavlenko, a professor at the center for multilingualism in Norway) means, my best idea is "multilingualism is discussed this way in Norway in one or more of three possible contexts (foreign language education, european languages, immigration)". Maybe this cliché is how multilinguialism advertises itself to people who provide funding or study there or to the public:)
Yes, once I counted overheard conversations in more than 10 languages at a bus stop in Moscow (in a half a hour while still waiting for the same bus). Our CITIES are very multilingual in many ways. It is true when "our world" is … hm. A bit provincial:)
Though, as I mentioned before, to my absolute shock Muscovites never discuss languages they hear on streets all the time. I mean, no one never mentions the fact. It would seriously undermine my faith in humanity (if there was such a faith), because it seriously recembles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else's_problem#Douglas_Adams'_SEP_field. Of course everyone notices these languages, but it seems until the hive mind provides people with an example/template of what can be felt, done or said about them they will just ingore them. (but I’m the same, I just own a template)
“I’ve seen just such a sentiment repeated in god knows how many thinkpieces” – Oh. So it is not something Norwegian. Then I don’t know what to think. I just never heard anything like that.
PS. Generally I don’t have any problem with “foreground”. But ” [….] historic normativity of institutional multilingualism and language mixing” is bad enough even when it is not a direct object of “foreground”, “put in foreground” etc.
Maybe in a language with cases (historic.ACC normativity.ACC institutional.GEN multilingualism.GEN and language.ADJ.GEN mixing.GEN, that is [block1].ACC of [block2].GEN) it would be better.
I’d avoid “normativity of institutional” (I’m not sure what “institutional” refers to here) even wihtout putting it in unclear relationship with history by “historic” (“used to be so” it means here, but the word means other things too).
But enough annotation bashing. “Transformation of polyglot societies into monolingual ones” does sound interesting.
Wow! I’ve been wrong for going on 200 years.
For 205 years, even…
“This magnificent assemblage at the will of the drafts-man, may be foregrounded by rocks or trees”
Let’s draft some happy little trees.
I have heard such a claim regarding multilingualism about the early modern period, but today the lament seems to be that everybody only knows their native language and English. Perhaps it’s a roundabout and weirdly misleading way of saying that larger cities tend to have well over 170 different nationalities represented?
Yes, I suspect that’s what such writers have in mind.
Indeed: Coleridge writes, “And here you will observe, that the reaction of Ariosto’s own feelings on the image or act is more fore-grounded (to use a painter’s phrase) than the image or act itself.” This is from a lecture given on Feb. 27, 1818 (but published here in 1836).
One of the false positives I found is this book of 1612, Japhet’s first Publique Perswasion into Sems tents. This is the first time I’ve seen either of those spellings. Having them both together is very exciting.
home language + lingua franca(s) multilingualism (whether tzotzil+castellano in chiapas, pulaar+french+english in brooklyn, or hijazi+fusha in medina) seems like a very different thing from more horizontal multilingualisms (say, yiddish+ukrainian+romanian in 1910 bukovina, or macedonian slavic+albanian+macedonian turkish in 2006 ohrid). neither’s new, and the two can be simultaneous (that bukovinan could easily also speak russian or german; the macedonian i’m thinking of also had english and istanbul turkish, and possibly german). but they seem like different phenomena, and worth thinking about in their specificity, especially if (dunno if it’s true) the latter is being supplanted by the former after a century-plus of nation-state population engineering overlaid on several centuries of colonialism.
Arguably the basic confusion here is about increasing multilingualism in the realm of written language.