Seminar on Monolingualism
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% -- most people in the world are multilingual. Yet, multilingual competence is regularly treated as an unusual, secondary or even aberrant state that requires explanation and interpretation, while monolingualism is assumed to be the human default, despite its numerically inferior status. In this course, we will reverse this typical paradigm, and instead 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 equally welcomed.
Learning Outcomes
- By the end of the course, students will have developed and refined the ability to:
1) Motivate and apply diverse theoretical approaches – sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and language-systemic – to the description and analysis of multi-/monolingualism.
2) Critically frame questions and evaluate findings which stand to innovatively and conscientiously advance the state of understanding of mono-/multilingualism.
3) Intentionally articulate and approach their own positionality and agency with regard to these topics.