The Many Roads to Becoming Multilingual

Nicholas Evans is a linguist and talks here mostly about languages and “language ecologies” from Northern Australia and Southern Papua New Guinea. He also mentions some communities in Cameroon in Africa.

• Multilingualism has historically and traditionally been very important in small-scale speech communities
• That is it is not really a modern phenomenon that resulted from urbanisation and the like
• Inter-language marriages are common in many places
• Extraordinarily high levels of fluency in multiple languages is fairly common many places
• High levels of receptive competence are common, that is people often know to understand but not use a language themselves

Multilingual song-lines against hegemony

In Northern Australia he mentions that:

• Language is an almost geographical feature
• People even switch the language used for communication upon entering another area
• Song-lines (cycles) are encoded with each leg being in a different language depending on the area its in
• Thus for large ceremonies all groups have to attend and perform in order for the entire song to be completed
• This assures that no single group can claim ownership over the common culture and cosmology
• It also naturally incentivises cooperation