Pointing out Perceived Monolingualism:  Citizen Sociolinguistics in Action

No community is truly “monolingual”—even when they think they are!

Recently, language professionals have named a community’s illusion of language purity “perceived monolingualism” (Thank you @MCP718, mariacioe-pena.com, for this useful phrase!). Initially, this concept made me nervous about the role of citizen sociolinguistics.  The concept of “perceived monolingualism” raises the specter of a dark kind of citizen sociolinguist–one who propagates misunderstanding, eliminates language variety, and possibly worse.  Perhaps naïvely, I usually like to think of citizen sociolinguists as people happily championing the creative capacity of multilingualism and language variety,  busily spreading the word about how it works.   Once we recognize a type of citizen sociolinguist willfully lacking in awareness of the multilingualism all around, who can we call on  to set them straight?

Other citizen sociolinguists, of course!  In at least some cases, citizen sociolinguists are the best candidates to point out this misperception of monolingualism—and the most likely to…