All the empathy of a well-trained mortician.

[rwd0002 at unt.edu]

> It's a sad state of affairs when the vast majority of linguists studying
> native languages are themselves monolingual. Why would someone who loves
> language so much avoid the wonderful experience of communicating in another
> language? It's not the languages they love. It's the knife. The languages
> are incidental.
>
I read with interest the initial Volkswagen comment by Pat Warren, and the very
good responses, particularly those by Henning Garvin and Bob Rankin.  However, I
am not sure that the vast majority of linguists studying native languages are
monolingual.  It is true that the U.S. is unusual in having large quantities of
highly educated people, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, etc., who are
monolingual in English and seem to be happy with that.  But that is unusual in
the world context.  Even bilingualism is unusual in a larger context.  For
example, European linguists will usually speak not one, but at least two or
three languages in addition to their native one.   U.S. schools seem to believe
that bilingualism is hard, and multilingualism an impossible task.  And on the
reservation schools where I work it is the same thing, kids have the choice
between taking the Native Language and Spanish, as though their brains cannot
handle more than one other language.  And many take Spanish...  The funny thing
is of course that in pre-contact and pre-Anglo times many Native people were
multilingual, and it wasn't a problem.  My feeling is that in the U.S. context
we would all relate to each other better if we went beyond the
monolingual/bilingual dichotomy, and if both linguists and Native people were
MULTIlingual to a greater extent. (Just a thought, I hope it is not too far
off-topic.)

Willem de Reuse