With the rise of the internet, most people around the world learn English. So why strain yourself to learn other languages? For a number of reasons. One, it's not just a language, with the language comes a whole culture, way of thinking, etiquette, social manners, politics, religion, alternative perspectives, which are different from your own, whatever your mother tongue is and wherever you were born or grew up. Two, Languages are not only about acquiring knowledge but they also develop empathy. When you are learning a new language, it's not like a mathematical exercise whereby you just focus on grammar and sentence construction and the meaning of words. You enter into an entire world.
As I've recently mentioned on social media, I've been learning multiple languages on Duolingo, some I've already studied and some new ones. To some extent I've always been a plurilinguist, but Duolingo is helping me to take that to a new level. By the age of five, I already knew or was learning five languages: English (mother tongue); Czech (heritage); French, Spanish and German (foreign languages). So I was brought up to be a plurilinguist from the start.
A plurilinguist is someone who knows more than three languages so there's quite a few of us around the world, although I think more than five plus languages is more distinctive of a plurilinguist. And a plurilinguist is able to switch between languages with relative ease. Plurilingualism is a relatively new concept which emphasizes that it's a social skill that encompasses an appreciation of multiculturalism and communication, it's not just a linguistic skill. It always values being brave enough to start new languages that are totally off your radar, learning several languages within a language family without necessarily becoming fluent in all of them. Obviously a plurilinguist is fluent in at least three languages. But the difference between a plurilinguist and a multilinguist is that it appreciates the value of a beginners level in a language too, because it's all part of a social skill and developing empathy.
This blog is not about teaching you a foreign language. It's far broader in scope than that and it's more about discussing languages and everything around them, like culture. It's not a place where I'll be announcing: this week I'll be teaching you how to speak Danish!
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