The Superlinguists: Monolingual societies

The Documentary Podcast

• Episode: The Superlinguists: Monolingual societies
• Website: The Documentary Podcast
• Feed URL: http://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nq0lx.rss
• Duration: 00:27:49
• Published: 2019-07-23 15:00

Simon Calder meets speakers of indigenous languages (like Welsh in Britain), of dialects (like Moselfrankish in Germany) and vernaculars (like African-American Vernacular English, in the US). These speakers all use the mainstream language every day, but code-switch to their variants, questioning whether their societies are monolingual. Is there even something sinister and oppressive to the idea of monolingualism?