Date: Wed, 13 Sep 1995 15:05:30 CST

From: salikoko mufwene mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU

Subject: Re: FOR English Only



Natalie and Tom:

I am glad I asked the question about "viable communication," because I

realize now that you both did not assume the same thing, at least based on

the answers I just read. In concession to Tom, I should have asked the

question in terms of "scale of communication," not "level of communication."

Natalie, as you answer the question in terms of

communication sufficient to maintain some sort of national identity,

should I assume that mutilingual nations would have identity problems?

But I'll go back to Tom's reply, very briefly, the need for having a common

language for communication at the level of a few individuals does not

translate empirically into the need for one single nationwide language for

communication. There are a host of sociohistorical factors to take into

account in this case. Besides, there are problems of communication (mutual

intelligibility) in monolingual countries. Even here in the United States, I

have witnessed native speakers of English failing to communicate successful

in their own native English! You may as well follow some incidents on this

list too, but the experiences I referred to involve nonlinguists.

Sali.

***********************************************************************

Salikoko S. Mufwene

University of Chicago

Dept. of Linguistics

1010 East 59th Street

Chicago, IL 60637

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531; fax: 312-702-9861