The influence of multilingualism on the L1 – or why the monolingual standard is out

Abstract

This lecture presents reasons why we should all abandon traditional dichotomies in Linguistics research, such as monolingual versus multilingual, native versus non-native, innate versus learned, biological versus cultural factors. It is argued that we should rather understand multilingualism a continuum, ranging from less multilingual to more multilingual, and the reason for it is that real monolingualism is becoming rarer because more people learn other languages or are simply exposed to multilingualism in society. Consequently, multilingual is to be considered here in a broad sense, as a synonym to being able to handle more than one language at any age, and not only from birth. The lecturer concludes, again, that the native speaker as a role model to be followed by language learners does not make sense.