World English

On Sat, 2008-12-27 at 21:38 +0000, R A Brown wrote:
> Bilingualism is the *norm* in very many parts of this planet - indeed, I
> am told that trilingualism is not uncommon in some parts.
To quote an interesting case from Comrie's Languages of the Soviet
Union:
"The Parya … number about 1000 and live … from the suburbs of the Tajik
capital westwards … All adult Parya, including women, are bilingual in
Parya and Tajik, some of the men also speak Uzbek, and all children grow
up speaking Parya; knowledge of Russian comes only from the educational
system."
Quadrilinguals!

In Papua New Guinea "there is a distinct prestige associated with
multilingualism" in many communities. (Foley, Papuan Languages of New
Guinea)

Predicting people's choice of language is surprisingly difficult: when
the Ubykh migrated to Turkey, one might have expected them to abandon
their language for Turkish, but instead they switched to Circassian for
their L1. Foley pointed out the differences one can find in attitudes in
New Guinea. In the village of Yimas, most young people prefer Tok Pisin
to their own language, while in the next village of Ambonwari, all the
children talk Karawari. Similarly in eighteenth century Europe, both
Gaelic and Czech were largely peasant languages. The Czech middle class
revived their language (Dvořak's L1 was German), the Irish didn't.