Word: polyglots
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...coral polo shirt and khaki shorts, Teeda Sokhoeun sits on a swivel chair next to a tiny couch in the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her mom and five siblings in a rough working-class neighborhood of Long Beach. The port city south of Los Angeles is a polyglot of Cambodians, Latinos, African Americans and Anglos. Incomes in this inner city neighborhood are low, violence sometimes high, but Long Beach boasts one of the best urban school districts in the nation and Sokhoeun is one of the stars. A 4.35 GPA honor student, Sokhoeun has been admitted...
...evening offers an intimate mixture of living-room conversation and informal recitals, with a heavy sprinkling of reminiscences about the Cape Town of old, where the jazz and carnival music filled the air of crowded polyglot neighborhoods...
...protagonist, Hidayat, is a Jakartan intellectual caught up in the Japanese occupation. The conquerors use Bahasa Indonesia, the archipelago's lingua franca, as an administrative tongue in their polyglot territory. Hidayat - drawing on Alisjahbana's actual wartime employment in occupied Indonesia's language office - is put in charge of formalizing its grammar and syntax. In the novel (as it was in life), the office is a meeting place for nationalists who seize on Japan's defeat in 1945 to declare independence and adopt Bahasa Indonesia as the new nation's official tongue...
...survive in spirit, too. Misfits like Webb still wander into Singapore, and though firms like Blackett's have ceded to local conglomerates, his penchant for order and profit can still be witnessed within today's business élite. With his gentle wit Farrell captures the soul of Singapore: a polyglot Asian port, still partly under the sleepy sway of its British colonial past, and still lurching toward an uncertain future with a furious, irresistible energy...
...women and only able to avenge themselves against the Apache through an alliance with the territory's Mexicans and [Tohono O'odham] fit poorly with the narrative of white mastery. ... The tendency to see Anglos as the primary actors in the region's historical drama not only bleached the polyglot character of the early U.S. borderlands out of many studies; it also rendered an episode like the Camp Grant Massacre a problematic and therefore marginal event...