This paper is part of an enquiry into the cultural background to the normal ization of measures in France at the end of the eighteenth century. But since it is being given at a meeting of the Modern Humanities Research Association, it seems appropriate to speak first a little about a different kind of normalization. This may well have begun, or at least gathered strength, in the France of the same epoch. Like metrification, this second type of normalization takes one measure and aligns everything to it. But this time, the measure is linguistic, and nowadays it is usually, however mistakenly, taken to be English. Now, this may be dangerous, in our case, for our particular profession and our separate jobs. But I am going to argue that it is even more dangerous: dangerous for our mental agility, for the way we think, for our very capacity to take on new ideas. I refer to assumptions about the normalization of languages. It is only recently that monolingualism has been at all valued, and probably at all common. In the France of the eighteenth century, many people will have been bilingual between local dialect and a more regulated French. In present day Scotland, many are bilingual between Scots-a true language, I remind you, with a centuries-old literature and English, and the same is true in Ger many, between Hochdeutsch and Schwabisch, for instance. My friends from the south of India move between four languages, Kanaada, Tulu, Telugu, and English. Now, these friends tend to avoid Hindi, and that can provide one rea son for linguistic normalization: as the joke says, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy; it explains, too, why what a friend and colleague Donald Rayfield assures me is essentially the same language with different slants to its vocabulary, with different scripts-Serbo-Croat-is known as Bosnian, Slove nian, Serbian, or Croat in what yet different friends, though no doubt with a different political persuasion, persist in calling ex-Yugoslavia. We humans find it hard to manage this pull towards homogenization and our urge to particular ity. It may be that these move in cycles; it seems likely that a particular historical era, one of unification, of loss of singularity in speech or dress, is coming to a close in Western Europe. We know that radio and television in Britain are much more tolerant of linguistic variation than even twenty years ago. For the United Kingdom, anyway, the relation between this tolerance and the dissolution, or rather, perhaps, the rebalancing, of class or race or geographical distinctions would be worth exploring-I haven't been able to find that it has been inves tigated. But it could perhaps be the case that this pull to homogenization is cyclical: after the creation of nation states, perhaps the new Europe will allow>, space for much smaller cultures-Welsh, Breton, Lombard, Basque, Catalan,