Multilingualism is still alive! At least that’s the message we got loud and clear from Eurovision this weekend, with four of the top five songs in a language other than English.
Yes: thankfully, the world (well, Europe, at least) isn’t sleepwalking into an anglophone beige. It’s a welcome theme that ran through the whole week. A lot of it came from the Eurovision immersion, naturally. I spent a good chunk of time devouring home-spun news articles from my favourite countries and artists in the lead-up to Saturday’s final. I just love getting other takes on my favourite show, and most of the best ones aren’t in English.
But the whole jamboree (very appropriately) also coincided with the Polyglot Gathering. I spent a few great hours chatting and listening to talks online, switching from room to room, language to language, using everything but English. Proper multilingual merry-go-round stuff. The fun of it all got me thinking about how to de-anglify my life a little bit more.
Little Multilingual Things
One of the easiest, lowest-outlay, little things we can do, in order to dent the preponderance of English online, is produce more multilingual content ourselves. I follow some lovely folk on Twitter who regularly switch between a number of languages for status updates.
Side note: I realise the irony of me writing this blog in English right now. Ahem.
Anyway, these things are sometimes easier said than done. Namely, there are two hurdles to getting starting ab initio here:
- A fear of alienating those followers who don’t understand the language of choice
- A fear of making mistakes and looking silly (“you’re not a real polyglot, you fraud!”)
It’s easy to deal with the first quibble. Most platforms have a translation feature now, so an unfamiliar language is understandable with a single click. Twitter is great for this – I use the ‘translate tweet’ option so often that I completely take it for granted .
The second problem is a little harder to tackle, as it comes from a very human – and probably ubiquitous – place of wobbly self-confidence. But going back to the Polyglot Conference, it helps to remember how utterly supportive our language learning community is. I sat in a room for fluent Germanists on Thursday, and the acceptance of all levels of fluency really warmed the cockles of my heart. I’m sometimes one to clam up when I think my mistakes will show – especially with my stronger languages, for some reason – but I’ve never felt more at ease. It reminds me that polyglotism isn’t some lofty refuge of geniuses, but something we can all aspire to.
Making the Effort
In short, there are really no serious obstacles to extending this wonderful world where Italian, French and Ukrainian can take their places quite naturally next to the anglophonic behemoth. I’ll be making more of an effort to do just that over the coming weeks.