Monoglot madness
Monoglot Madness
The BBC reports that:
Modern languages lessons will be available for pupils in every primary school in England by the end of the decade.[and later...]
On Monday, ambassadors from Germany, France, Italy and Spain issued a joint plea for language teaching in England to be improved.
It's about time, too! I was "taught" both French and Latin in primary school, but I don't think it had any lasting effect (we started from scratch in secondary school, anyway).
Meanwhile, the Guardian claims to have "[t]he best news sources on the world wide web", and Torill wonders if this is anglocentric. The (anglophone) pig in a wig thinks not; the guide lists native language resources for most countries very prominently indeed. Some (but only some) of the front page resources are in English; look at individual countries' entries and they're mostly in Forrin.
Also,
Tinka says said
(it's been unblogged!):
I have this notion that the so-called incredibly democratic and subverting form of writing which we call 'blogging' is incredibly etnocentric.
I don't know what that means. Nonetheless I would point out that my last entry quotes bilingually from a Swedish newspaper, just in case that's a defence.
But Tinka also brings us the linguistic hegemony blog , so that's alright. Especially since many of the entries (from the French media) appear to relate to the status of French as an Important Global Language. Especially since I made my first ever order from amazon.fr just yesterday. (And I just got the email saying
Nous vous informons de l'envoi de vos articles aujourd'hui, terminant ainsi le traitement de votre commande.
Yippee!)