Most of the world's population has always been multilingual — monolingualism is a historical anomaly produced by the particular circumstances of nation-state formation in Northern Europe and North America. The multilingual person navigates fluidly between different cultural worlds and their embedded assumptions, developing a meta-linguistic awareness that monolingual speakers rarely encounter. In contemplative terms, multilingualism is a repeated exercise in recognizing that the map is not the territory: each language is a different map of the same inexhaustible reality.
Patan