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Multilingualism in the English-speaking world: Pedigree of nations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2007

Katherine Mortimer
Katherine Mortimer
Affiliation:
Educational Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, ksmortim@dolphin.upenn.edu
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Extract

Viv Edwards, Multilingualism in the English-speaking world: Pedigree of nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. viii, 253. Pb $29.95.

Amid widespread talk about the dominance of English across the world, this volume is a reminder that even at the core of the English-speaking world, English monolingualism is not as universal as is often assumed. The book's subtitle, Pedigree of nations, conveys that, in fact, multilingualism is not only an important element of contemporary daily life in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, but also an essential thread in these nations' ancestral lines, indeed part of what has made them what they are today. In this comprehensive effort to dispel the “myth of monolingualism” (p. 3), Viv Edwards has assembled copious evidence of the use and significance of minority languages in English-dominant countries. Readers will find themselves better equipped to counter not only this general misconception but also the pervasive corollaries that position other languages and their speakers as problematic, outside the mainstream, and therefore outside the range of what is valued.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 267 - 270
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCE

Kachru, Braj B. (1985). Standards, codification, and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In Randolph Quirk & H. G. Widdowson (eds.), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures, 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.