Yes, as those multilingual messages, I'm

Gutti the BBC.

Lejo, you're a BBC,

like a BBC, and so it's BBC.

Yes, as those multilingual messages reveal,

you're listening to the BBC. I'm Simon Calder welcoming

you to the final program in our series here on the BBC World Service about people who speak many

languages, the super linguists.

Today I'm looking at the subject from the point of view of monolingle societies, countries where local-born people predominantly speak only one language.

I'm from England. Lots of people think of the United Kingdom and in particular of England

as a monolingle society. The same applies to some of the world's most populous nations, including Russia, Brazil and Japan.

But how accurate is that picture?

There are no monolilingual countries in the world. The multilingualism might be out of view and

might be hidden, but we no longer have monolingle societies.

Jean-Marc Dualle, professor of applied linguistics and multilingualism at the University of London's

Birkbeck College.

Even countries which are emphatically at the monolingu

end of the language spectrum have a babble of other tongues, some homegrown

others imported. Russia has only one official language, but besides Russian, this vast

nation which stretches from the Pacific to the Baltic has 27 regional co-official languages, ranging from Chechen in the Caucasus

to Yakut in the far northern region of Sakha.

Or take South America's biggest nation Brazil where 99% of the population

...