{"id":267,"date":"2007-07-20T05:00:27","date_gmt":"2007-07-20T13:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/20\/monolingualism-and-intolerance\/"},"modified":"2007-07-20T05:06:28","modified_gmt":"2007-07-20T13:06:28","slug":"monolingualism-and-intolerance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/language\/translation\/monolingualism-and-intolerance\/","title":{"rendered":"Monolingualism and Intolerance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>ntolerance has many triggers and takes many forms, but it tends to boil down to in-group and out-group status. Most people favor “people like us.” (Whereas tolerance springs from an acceptance of equality in difference; Tzvetan Todorov’s formulation of this in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other<\/a><\/em> is a favorite of mine.)<\/p>\n

What’s a bit surprising is how early the process starts, and the extent to which speech plays a fundamental role. Researchers at Harvard and the \u00c9cole des Hautes \u00c9tudes en Sciences Sociales have found that young children favor speakers of their native language — and dialect — even before they themselves have learned to talk. According to the Web of Language<\/a>, “When the researchers showed babies from English-speaking families videos of English- and Spanish-speaking adults, they found that infants who have yet to master ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’ were already suspicious of people who said ‘Mami’ and ‘Papi.'”<\/p>\n

No doubt this attitude contributes to the fervor of anti-immigrationists.<\/p>\n

The researchers “hint that bilingual babies may be more accepting of diversity” and that “manipulating early language experience might actually help to reduce the social conflicts that emerge later on.”<\/p>\n

I’m thinking of translators I’ve known. Are they more tolerant than others? Hmmm. I’m not sure, but I think as a group they were more or less like anyone else.<\/p>\n

\n

Research article: Spelke et al., \u201cThe Native Language of Social Cognition.\u201d Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,<\/em> July 24, 2007.Via: The Web of Language<\/a><\/p>\n

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Intolerance has many triggers and takes many forms, but it tends to boil down to in-group and out-group status. Most people favor “people like us.” (Whereas tolerance springs…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[34,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}