Speaking of Babel: The Risks and Rewards of Writing about Polyglot Societies

Common as it is to map languages as colored patches of a global quilt, this article proposes an understanding of language, dialect, and multilingualism beyond territoriality. The author references different regions where multilingualism and registers of discourse are indices not so much of mastery, but of pragmatics. With examples drawn from his own works The Shadow Lines and The Hungry Tide, the author ultimately questions the linguistic determinism of national literary paradigms.