Multilingualism

• 1. The World's Quiet Majority

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  Most people on Earth move between two or more languages, and the speakers who do so outnumber those who use only one. That single fact reframes the whole subject. Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, by a single speaker or by a whole group, and when the count is exactly two we usually call it bilingualism. More than half of all Europeans say they speak at least one language besides their mother tongue, though many of them only read and write in one. The person who handles several languages has a name of their own, the polyglot. Why, then, do scholars still argue over where one language ends and another begins? Why does a foreign language seem to dull a moral dilemma, or hand a job applicant thousands of extra dollars a year? And how did a man with a non-verbal IQ between 40 and 70 come to learn sixteen languages? The answers run through childhood acquisition, the economics of work, the inner life of the bilingual mind, and the way whole communities braid their tongues together.

• 2. Where One Language Ends

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  Since 1992, the linguist Vivian Cook has argued that most multilingual speakers sit somewhere between two extremes. At one end is total mastery, control equal to a native speaker. At the other is the tourist who knows just enough phrases to get around. Cook calls the people in the middle multi-competent, a label that quietly dissolves the demand for perfection. The trouble runs deeper than fluency, because there is no settled definition of what even counts as a distinct language. Scholars often disagree on whether Scots is a language of its own or a dialect of English. What counts as a language can shift for purely political reasons. Serbo-Croatian was built as a standard tongue on the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect, an umbrella over many South Slavic dialects. After Yugoslavia broke apart, it split into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. The Russian tsars went the other way, dismissing Ukrainian as a mere Russian dialect to dampen national feeling. The word itself is young by comparison. The first recorded use of multilingual in English appears in the 1830s, built from multi, meaning many, and lingual, pertaining to languages. The phenomenon, of course, is as old as the existence of different languages, leaving traces such as glosses in old texts and macaronic writing that blends two tongues for a reader expected to know both.

• 3. The Childhood Window

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  Noam Chomsky proposed a human language acquisition device, a mechanism that lets a learner reconstruct the rules of the speech around them. According to Chomsky, this device wears out over time and is not normally available by puberty, which he uses to explain why so many adolescents and adults struggle with a second language. The school led by Stephen Krashen sees it differently, treating language learning as a cognitive process. If that is right, the gap between first and second language learning would be only relative, not a hard categorical break. Rod Ellis quotes that the earlier children learn a second language, the better off they are in terms of pronunciation. Children who pick up two languages natively from their earliest years are called simultaneous bilinguals, and it is common for them to be stronger in one than the other. Others come to it later through sequential acquisition, perhaps by migrating young to a country with a different tongue, or by speaking a heritage language at home until school immerses them in another. Researchers use age three as the point when a child has basic communicative competence in a first language. Ann Fathman's work, The Relationship Between Age and Second Language Productive Ability, found that age changes the rate of learning English morphology, syntax and phonology, but the order of acquisition does not change with age. Belief about timing has shifted too. Children were once thought to learn a language within a year; today researchers put the period closer to five years.

• 4. The Economics Of Two Tongues

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  A study in Switzerland found that multilingualism is positively correlated with an individual's salary, the productivity of firms, and the country's gross domestic product. Its authors state that Switzerland's GDP is augmented by 10 percent by multilingualism. The advantage is practical. A bilingual worker can serve customers who speak only a minority language, a task simply closed to a monolingual colleague. In the United States, a study by O. Agirdag found substantial economic benefits, with bilingual people earning around 3,000 dollars more per year than monolinguals. The pull reaches across continents. Many Asian companies, facing globalization, have pressed harder on their employees' English. In South Korea since the 1990s, firms have used English tests to screen applicants and kept raising the bar. Japan ranked 53rd out of 100 countries in the 2019 EF English Proficiency Index, with calls to improve before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In Africa, English matters not only to multinationals but in engineering, chemistry, electricity and aeronautics. A study by Hill and van Zyl in 2002 found young black engineers in South Africa using English most for communication and documentation, while turning to Afrikaans and other local languages to explain concepts and secure cooperation. Even inside English-speaking countries the mother tongue holds on at work. Hewitt in 2008 described London entrepreneurs from Poland, China and Turkey using English with customers and banks but their native languages for work tasks. Kovacs in 2004 found Finnish immigrants in Australia's construction industry speaking Finnish through the working day.

• 5. The Mind In Two Channels

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  A study in 2012 showed that using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases, with the framing effect vanishing when choices were presented in a second language. The reasoning rests on two modes of thought, one systematic, analytical and effortful, the other fast, unconscious and emotionally charged. A second language seems to add cognitive distance from those automatic processes, nudging the mind toward analysis. A study a year later found that switching to a second language seems to exempt bilinguals from social norms such as political correctness. In 2014 another study showed people using a foreign language were more likely to make utilitarian choices in moral dilemmas like the trolley problem. Participants chose the utilitarian option more often in the Fat Man dilemma when it was posed in a foreign language, though the related Switch Track dilemma showed no significant effect. The authors surmised that a foreign language lacks the emotional weight of one's native tongue. The older story of a broad bilingual brain has not held up. There is no evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive function, and current meta-analyses find no effect, with the earlier idea persisting partly through publication bias. Claims of delayed dementia have met repeated failures to replicate. One area still shows a signal. Bilingual and multilingual individuals are reported to have superior auditory processing, tested through gap detection, temporal ordering and pitch pattern recognition, with second-language proficiency shaping the result.

• 6. Many Tongues, Many Selves

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  Some bilinguals feel their personality shifts with the language they speak, leading to the claim that multilingualism creates multiple personalities. Xiao-lei Wang, in her book Growing up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven, writes that languages are used not just to represent a unitary self, but to enact different kinds of selves, with different linguistic contexts producing different self-expression for the same person. The claim invites caution. There has been little rigorous research, and personality itself is hard to define here. Francois Grosjean wrote that what looks like a change in personality is most probably simply a shift in attitudes and behaviors matching a shift in situation, independent of language. Underneath sits a deeper proposition, the idea of linguistic relativity, which holds that the language people speak shapes how they see the world. Read one way, a person who speaks several languages carries a broader, more varied view even while speaking just one at a time. Some studies have found multilingual groups scoring higher on cultural empathy, open-mindedness and social initiative. Because mastering the high-level semantic reaches of a language, its idioms and eponyms, demands knowing the culture and history behind it, deep familiarity with multiple cultures becomes a practical prerequisite for high-level multilingualism. The far edge of this terrain belongs to the hyperpolyglots. Many polyglots manage five or six languages before the frequency drops sharply. Michael Erard places the hyperpolyglot threshold at eleven or more, while Usman W. Chohan suggests six to eight. Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, an Italian priest, was reputed to have spoken anywhere from 30 to 72 languages.

• 7. How Communities Braid Languages

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  Linguist Ekkehard Wolff estimates that 50 percent of the population of Africa is multilingual. Widespread multilingualism is one form of language contact, and it was common long ago, when small language communities had to know two or more tongues for trade beyond their own village. The same holds today in places of high linguistic diversity such as Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Not every speaker in a multilingual society is multilingual. Canada recognizes English and French; in Malaysia and Singapore particular languages attach to particular ethnicities. When all speakers are multilingual, linguists sort the community by how the languages divide their work. Where there is a structural-functional split, the society is diglossic, as in Frisia, with Frisian beside German or Dutch, and Lusatia, with Sorbian beside German. A region is ambilingual when no such division can be predicted, a rare condition glimpsed in Luxembourg, in Malaysia and Singapore, and in communities with high rates of deafness such as Martha's Vineyard, where inhabitants historically spoke both Martha's Vineyard Sign Language and English. Where many languages are heard but most speakers stay monolingual, the area is bipart-lingual, as in the Balkans. Speakers also meet without merging their tongues at all. Across Scandinavia, speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish often converse each in their own language, a pattern the Dutch linguist Reitze Jonkman called non-convergent discourse. In the former Czechoslovakia, Czechs and Slovaks routinely understood each other while each spoke their mother tongue, a habit still alive though fading since the split. Taxell's paradox, drawn from Swedish in Finland, warns that monolingual solutions may be essential to functional bilingualism, with multilingual solutions drifting toward monolingualism.

• 8. Voices On The Page And Screen

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  Gloria E. Anzaldua, a Chicana author central to Third World Feminism and Latino philosophy, refused to keep translating herself. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza she wrote that until she is free to write bilingually and to switch codes without always translating, her tongue will be illegitimate, declaring she will have her serpent's tongue and overcome the tradition of silence. Other writers chart their own paths between languages. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie offered Igbo phrases with translations in Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, then withheld translation in her later novel Americanah. Sandra Cisneros, in The House on Mango Street, leaves Spanish words untranslated though italicized, and Cormac McCarthy folds untranslated Spanish and Spanglish into his fiction. Poetry carries the same braid, with code-switching among English, Spanish and Spanglish common in Latino verse, sometimes reaching into Nahuatl, Mayan, Huichol and Arawakan. Mary Stanley Low, a British-Cuban activist and surrealist poet, published the trilingual volume Tres voces in 1957 with poems in English, Spanish and French. Songs with lyrics in several languages are known as macaronic verse, and the 2011 classical album Troika set Russian poems against English self-translations by Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov. Film records the labor behind such crossings. The 2021 Indian documentary Dreaming of Words follows Njattyela Sreedharan, a fourth standard drop-out who spent twenty five years compiling a dictionary linking Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu, traveling across four states to do it.