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Episode details

World Service,23 Jul 2019,27 mins

The Superlinguists: Monolingual societies

The Documentary Podcast

Available for over a year

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?

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