12/8/2022 0 Comments Monolingual countriesThe university departments where my studies and early career were located were the English Department, the German Department and the Romance Department. Philology is a field that combines the study of a specific language with the study of the literature produced in that language. Having been educated in Germany, I hold degrees in English, German and Spanish Philology. Monolingual ways of seeing I: generic and context-free multilingualism I conclude by asking how multilingual ways of seeing could be fostered in the field. Specific aspects of these English-monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism that I address here include perceptions of multilingualism as generic and context-free as characteristic of the present and as constituted in textual products rather than processes of production and reception. English monolingualism undergirds contemporary ways of seeing multilingualism, including, and perhaps particularly, academic research into multilingualism. In speaking of ‘ways of seeing’ I draw on Berger ( 1972), who argues that what we see is constrained by what we expect to see based on our beliefs and knowledge. In this commentary, I expand on Liddicoat's quantitative findings by sketching out a qualitative examination of monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Only 7% of the references cited in his corpus of multilingualism research articles refer to work in languages other than English. Tony Liddicoat shows that English-language research publications about multilingualism are by and large a monolingual affair.
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