Beyond the Mother Tongue

Download or read book Beyond the Mother Tongue written by Yasemin Yildiz and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monolingualism-the idea that having just one language is the norm is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.