"Mehrotra has much to say of value – of urgency – on the matter of multilingualism, creative practice, and translation (in both its literal and figurative sense), issues that are pressingly important in today's world," McDonald said today.
In 2006, at a conference in Vienna, he presented a paper, "Municipal Services and Local Governments in Light of Multilingualism".
With such a public embrace of multilingualism, the state could shed its monocultural reputation entirely.
The commission must struggle to defend its collegiate tradition with 27 members, the newest of whom, a Romanian, has the humiliating non-portfolio of multilingualism.
Discovery examines the beneficial effects of multilingualism on the mind, while Books charts the history of exercise culture and the enduring quest for the body beautiful.
This points to an unsettling conclusion for advocates of multilingualism: in a union of many languages, increasingly there is but one language.
My colleague argued in favour of multilingualism in Spain on the grounds that speakers of Castilian Spanish should be "proud to learn their country's other languages".
Mr Orban is to have a new post, in charge of "multilingualism".He seems qualified, since he speaks English, French and Italian.
These days, rather than simply pointing at stuff and speaking loudly in English we've developed a new form of multilingualism, which involves still speaking in English but with a subtle hint of a local accent.
As Haubold argues in his new book Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature, it is an approach that can beckon towards the "cultivation of multilingualism, polyglossia, the arts of cultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness.
Will the country's demographic shifts demand a greater acceptance of multilingualism, and will there be a freer commingling of different speech varieties through what sociolinguists call "code-switching" and "code-mixing"?
