Review: Gramling, David (2016). The invention of monolingualism. New York, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Abstract

This piece reviews David Gramling’s The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2016), winner of the 2018 American Association for Applied Linguistics book award. With the prevalence of academic discourse on bi/multilingualism, this book takes on the under-explored notion of monolingualism. Drawing from a range of disciplines, including applied linguistics, literary studies,translation studies, and comparative world literature, Gramling raises important questions about  monolingualism, how the term is used, and understandings of language itself.