monoglot
noun

- A person who speaks only one language

- Having command of a single language; written in, composed of, or containing a single language

- Knowing or using only one language : monolingual

- A person who speaks or writes only one language; a monolingual

Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Collins English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

From Greek monos (“alone, single”) plus glōtta, the Attic dialect form of glōssa (tongue, language).

The word entered English in the early nineteenth century — Webster’s dates it to the 1820s — coined on the model of the far older polyglot, which had arrived in the seventeenth century from Greek polyglōttos, (many-tongued).

The same Greek tongue gave English "glossary", "glottal" and "epiglottis".

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THE HIGH PRICE OF A SINGLE LANGUAGE

Speaking only one language is, worldwide, the minority condition — yet in Britain, America and Australia it passes for normal. That normality has a price.

Translation is often imagined as a matching game: find the English word for the German one and simply swap them,... not quite! Take Feierabend for example. “Closing time” gets the clock right and misses everything else — the small ceremony of laying work down for the day. Without the word, English speakers lack the extra category.

The cost shows up in the clinic too. In 2013, researchers in Hyderabad — one of the world’s most multilingual cities — studied 648 dementia patients and found that those who spoke two languages developed symptoms roughly four and a half years later than those who spoke one.

Charles V supposedly spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to his horse. The story is almost certainly invented, but it survives because it is true in spirit: each language sorts the world its own way, and a person with only one sorting system tends to mistake it for the world.

If you’re reading this, we guess you escaped long ago! Willkommen in the wider world :-))

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

MONOGLOT, monolingual, monolinguist, one-language speaker, unilingual, unilinguist, uniglot

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“Today’s OWAD makes a fine coffee-break provocation: Who is better equipped for international business — the MONOGLOT with perfect English, or the polyglot with imperfect English?"

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BIG THANKS to Annette for suggesting today’s OWAD!

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Paul Smith
(OWAD Founder)