monoglot
1
8.6
- noun
- /ˈmɒnəˌɡlɒt/
:
monolingüe
- Even in the deepest heartlands of Welsh speakers, being a monoglot Anglophone will barely inconvenience you at all, especially if you speak with the correct Welsh accent.
Examples
-
She has created, instead of a monoglot and closed narrative unity, a "dynamic unity" which is uniquely capable of representing a conflicting and evolving cultural and social life.
Academic text (1996) -
Notwithstanding its status as "the first language of Ireland," Irish is considered one of the world's most endangered languages; no one claims monoglot status, and as few as 30,000 communicate in the language regularly.
Academic text (2001) -
That he was a Hispano-monoglot, tone-deaf to any other language but the one he had been born into?
Fiction book (1991) -
I'm making a claim that the current decline in monoglot Welsh speakers can easily be attributed to utility.
Blog text (5) -
This doesn't mean that there are no 8/10 French movies, or that every monoglot English speaker overrates every French movie.
Blog text (10) -
The Irish know more about Britain than the British know about Ireland, and Irish speakers in Ireland know more about the world of their monoglot Anglophone compatriots than the latter do about the discourse taking place in the minority Irish-speaking networks and communities.
Academic text (2015) -
As a crude approximation, monoglot English speakers might rate French movie X as an 8/10 movie, while French speakers would rate X as 7/10, because the English viewers lack the capacity to detect weaknesses in the performances.
Blog text (10) -
As a monoglot, she only spoke Spanish and struggled to communicate in any other language.
-
Being a monoglot made it challenging for him to connect with people during his travels abroad.
-
The monoglot admitted that learning new languages was difficult but was eager to try.
Synonyms
A person who speaks only one language
A person who speaks only one language
Antonyms
How Multilingual
Surface Forms
Morphology
monoglot = mono + glot
The prefix mono- clearly means 'one', but glot is a bound classical form for 'language' or 'tongue' rather than a common standalone English word, so the meaning is not readily recoverable for most learners.
Etymology
Monoglot comes from mono- ('one') and -glot ('tongue' or 'language'), so a monoglot is a person who speaks only one language.