The multilingual lexicon

Ton Dijkstra
Table of contents

Modern media, like e-mail and internet, allow us to communicate with language users from all over the world after just one button press. As was already prophecized by the Canadian linguist Marshall McLuhan in 1962, our world is becoming more and more like a ‘global village’ in which it is not self-evident that a person speaks only one language. For the exchange of cultural and scientific knowledge, and for doing business abroad, people are pressed to speak more than one language and therefore become multilingual. We are witnessing an increase in the interest for multilingualism, which seems justified because there are probably more multilinguals in the world as a whole than monolinguals. Note there are about 200 independent states in the world and about 6800 living languages. In other words, there are more than 30 times as many languages than countries. If more than one language is spoken in a country, many inhabitants of that country will be multilingual themselves, because otherwise a Babylonian confusion of tongues would rule.

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