Talkin' About Talk Date Archives

How many languages is it possible for a person to speak?

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Scientists have long studied how language abilities can be impaired. We know, for example, how a stroke or auto accident can injure areas of the brain that are important for speech. But we don't know enough about exceptionally strong language ability -- about the upper limits of language learning.

It's not unusual for someone to speak two or three languages -- they're bilinguals, or trilinguals. Beyond that, we talk about speakers of multiple languages as "polyglots." I know, it's an ugly-sounding word, but I'd be greatly pleased to be thought of as a polyglot. It would put me in the company of people like Pope John Paul II, famous for his language skills. At a certain point -- and here we’re talking about people who speak many languages, maybe even a dozen, or more -- we can use the term "hyper-polyglot," which was coined a few years ago by linguist Richard Hudson. There's always a question about how well they speak the languages. We know more about them through anecdotes than we do through science; but still, such people exist, and their language feats are astonishing.

The most famous hyper-polyglot was probably Giuseppe Mezzofanti, a 19th century Italian Cardinal, who was reputed to speak 72 languages. The claim sounds preposterous. If you assume each language had 20,000 words, and Mezzofanti could remember a word infallibly after meeting it only once, he'd still have to learn a word a minute, 12 hours a day for five-and-a-half years. Not likely. But Mezzofanti was constantly tested by critics, and they were all impressed. One of them even called him "the Devil" because of his uncanny skill. Even if the stories are exaggerated, he was clearly some kind of linguistic superstar.

Did Mezzofanti have an extraordinary brain? Or are hyper-polyglots just ordinary people with ordinary brains who manage to do something extraordinary through motivation and hard work?

It's true that, after you have learned a second language, the third, fourth and other languages come easier, especially if the languages are related. You know more about how languages work, so in effect, you become an expert learner. Stephen Krashen, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, believes that exceptional language learners just work harder at it, and have a better understanding of how they learn. As an example, he cites a Hungarian woman who worked as an interpreter during the cold war. When she was 86 she could speak 16 languages, including Chinese and Russian, and was working on Hebrew. She said she learned them mostly on her own, reading fiction or working through dictionaries or textbooks. She learned Russian from romantic novels and Spanish from a translation of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Some researchers argue to the contrary, that there's such a thing as a talent for learning languages. Such people score higher on verbal ability tests, though they're not necessarily more intelligent than the rest of us. Other researchers argue that there's something special about the actual brain of a hyper-polyglot. In the only detailed study, a German neuroscientist examined slices of a preserved brain, which belonged to hyper-polyglot Emil Krebs. Before he died in 1930, Krebs was said to speak 60 languages fluently. The scientists found that an area of Krebs' brain called Broca's region, which is associated with language, looked different from the brains of 11 monolingual men. But we still don't know if Krebs was born with a brain primed to learn languages, or if his brain adapted to the demands he put on it.

So how many languages can a person learn? In theory -- except for having enough time to learn them-- there's no limit to the human capacity for language. Everyone is potentially a polyglot, maybe even a hyper-polyglot. But if so, why aren't there more people like Emil Krebs or Giuseppe Mezzofanti? Is hyper-polyglottism a matter of genetics?

The jury's still out about whether some people are born with the ability to learn exceptional numbers of languages. But there's no doubt that just about all of us can acquire skills in second, third and fourth languages by putting our minds to it. And when we do, we enrich our lives.

That's the language thought for today, which comes from Michael Erard, linguist and writer in Austin, Texas. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist . And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

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Posted by: Eugenio Carlos Brito at December 19, 2005 02:42 PM

Is there such a thing as too much language learning?

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Have you ever been faced with uncomfortable amounts of new or complicated information, and said something like: "I feel my head's going to explode"? Well, I don't want to blow anybody's head up, but we have been encouraging listeners and their children to learn new languages. So, in case you detect cerebral pressure building, let me offer some words of comfort about the magnificent flexibility of the human brain.

Researchers today compare the brain at birth to a kind of ready-to-assemble computer kit: it comes with working components, but they have to be connected before you have a fully functioning computer. In this view the brain comes with readiness for language in general, but acquiring the actual sounds, words, and grammar of a particular language means growing new connections between neurons, the individual brain cells. This connection-building is what happens as a toddler learns to associate the word "dog" with a four-legged animal and "milk" with what's in his drinking cup; or as another toddler learns the words "perro" for the same animal and "leche" for the same liquid.

But you may wonder: if a child is hearing both languages, will her brain mix them up and thereby hinder speech? Here's the comforting fact: the brain—especially in early childhood—has a huge, virtually inexhaustible capacity for making such connections. The more talk children are exposed to in the first three years of life, the better their language skills later. Not only that, children exposed to more than one language grow not only the connections that build vocabulary in each language, they grow connections that help them to sort out which language to use.

They learn, for example, to ask their English-speaking mother for "milk" and their Spanish-speaking grandmother for "leche".

In the past few years we've had the tragic example of people who adopted babies from orphanages in Eastern Europe and found that, as the children grew older, they were handicapped in talking to their American mothers. That wasn't a result of hearing a new language. It happened because the orphanages were thinly staffed. People watching the babies gave them minimal care and had little or no time to talk to them. They were linguistically starved, and didn't have the verbal stimulation that leads to normal use of language. Hearing talk, lots of talk, no matter how many languages are involved, is healthy activity for the human brain.

But the story gets even better. It seems there are cognitive advantages in training one's self to keep two or more languages separate. A recent study found that brain regions important for fluent speech were better developed in bilingual speakers than they were in monolinguals, especially when two languages were learned early in life.

Here's why: When a child wants to express a word in one language, the brain also activates the corresponding word in the other language. To prevent the word in the other language from being unintentionally spoken aloud, the brain has to suppress it. So, compared to the monolingual brain, the bilingual brain gets more experience in exercising this kind of control. Learning two languages at an early age is good for the brain -- and, you'll be interested to know, not just for learning to talk.

Studies at York University in Canada suggest that early bilinguals also have better cognitive control in certain types of non-verbal tasks. And that was true not just for children but also for middle-aged and older adults. Bilingualism seems to protect healthy older adults from some of the negative effects of aging on the brain. That in itself is an excellent reason to be born into a bilingual family -- or start a second language when you're still in diapers.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Henk Haarmann of the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And in the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

What does it mean to be bilingual?

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If you speak just one language, you probably think that's pretty normal, and that people who speak more than one are an exception, or at least a minority. In fact, it's just the opposite. Three quarters of the people in the world, including many in the U.S., are bilingual or multilingual. It's monolinguals who are a minority breed.

Bilingualism, of course, can mean different things. And not all bilinguals speak two languages at the same level. For example, after September 11th, 2001, bilinguals responded to calls for people who could handle both English and Arabic. But their skills weren't good enough to meet the need. Some spoke both languages fluently but couldn't read and write one of them well, or vice versa.

So how do you get to be bilingual? Often, it happens early in life, in a home where two languages are spoken. Parents sometimes speak both languages to the child; sometimes one parent uses one language and another uses the other. Or, bilingualism can be what linguists call "additive", where a new language is added to your repertoire later in life. You can obviously you do that by learning a language in school. Or maybe your parents move to Armenia when you're little and you learn Armenian while continuing to develop English skills at home.

A bilingual capability may also wither away, which can happen if you move to a new country and the language of the majority largely replaces your original language. We see that often in small children. By about age two-and-a-half a bilingual child starts to make choices in language use, and it's usually in favor of the majority language. Think of little Quang who moved to the U.S. from Vietnam. He runs errands for his grandmother when she speaks to him in Vietnamese, and may even answer her in Vietnamese, but not in the presence of his friends! He's decided that English is the language he's going to use most. And his skill in Vietnamese starts to fade. It can be revived, and he'll re-learn it more quickly than someone who starts it from scratch, but it'll take some serious effort.

Immigrant families in the U.S. who want their children to retain the community's heritage language, as well as English, have to consciously work at it. Children rarely have the chance to continue learning their heritage language at school, especially if it's a language like, let's say, Swedish or Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines. So some communities start special language programs after school or on Saturdays to help keep the language alive. Being bilingual doesn't automatically mean being bilingual for life.

Bilingualism is often confused with bilingual education, an approach to educating children who speak a language other than English. The thrust of bilingual education is to help students learn school subjects through their native tongue while they're learning English. For a variety of reasons it's been very controversial.

Lately, dual language education, has become popular, and seems to show promise. Dual language programs offer kids the chance to speak and do schoolwork in two languages (one of which is always English), and thus to experience additive bilingualism. Both language-minority and language-majority kids can become bilingual in classrooms where they learn together and help each other.

True bilinguals -- and by this I mean people whose skills in both languages are very strong -- have an enormous advantage in society. They can function in more than one culture. They can be bridges for communication in their communities -- and the globalized world. There are, of course, important reasons for new U.S.citizens and their children to learn English. But there are also important reasons for them to keep, nurture, and strengthen a language they learned at their mother's knee. Historically we have sometimes discouraged people from retaining their original language when they come to the U.S. And that's a national loss. We need to find ways instead... to encourage it.

That's the language thought for today, which comes from Dora Johnson of the Center for Applied Linguistics. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do, language makes a difference.

Why do languages die?

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Unh, this isn't a happy subject. For those of us who love languages, it's terrible to see that they're dying at a very rapid rate. About half the world's languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers -- about enough to fill a small-town football stadium.

Even worse is that most of the world's languages -- some think it's close to 90% -- may be lost by the end of this century. There are some languages for which there are only a handful of speakers left in the world; some have only one or two. And when they die, the language dies too.

Why do languages disappear? Well, let's look at some examples. In the mountains of India we can find - if we hurry - the Sulung people, now down to only a few thousand, who've been driven to a remote area by constant warfare with neighbouring tribes. If they're wiped out by their enemies, their language will vanish. Wars destroy more than people.

You might ask: can there be any new peoples and languages left to discover? Surprisingly, yes. A few have recently come to light when previously uncontacted people were found in isolated places. In 1991, for instance, an ancient language known as Gongduk was discovered in the Himalayas which, for linguists, was like finding the fabled lost valley of Shangri-La. And in the deep Brazilian interior, there are still languages being discovered, some of them unrelated to any other known tongue. But stories like that are rare. The overwhelming trend…is in the direction of extinction.

For the most part, high mountains, steep valleys, lack of infrastructure or roads -- afford little protection, not even in the far corners of the earth. Think about the speakers of Rapanui, on Easter Island in the Pacific. After centuries of separation from the world, they were taken from their island as slaves to collect guano from the coast of South America. Very few came back and today there are just a few thousand who have kept Rapanui alive in the face of Spanish, imported from Chile.

Thirty years ago in Brazil the Jiahui people were driven out of their traditional lands -- into the hands of hostile neighbours -- by ranchers and illegal timber cutters. The few that were left joined a less hostile group or drifted to the cities. Now they've reclaimed some of their lands, but how many Jiahui are left? Just fifty.

Or what about the Rikbatsá people in Brazil's Mato Grosso state? They were great warriors, but they couldn't fight epidemics of influenza and smallpox that were brought by Jesuit missionaries. Diseases imported from Europe decimated them and dozens of other native peoples of the Americas -- and with them their native tongues.

And if human invasions aren't bad enough, nature itself can swallow up languages. In 1998 a terrible tsunami struck the north coast of Papua New Guinea, and killed nearly all the speakers of the Warapu and Sissano languages. Just a few who weren't home at the time are the only ones left to keep the languages alive.

Finally, so-called "killer languages" -- like English or Spanish -- are so dominant that people may voluntarily give up their mother tongue -- for convenience or economic reasons. Indigenous peoples sometimes abandon their language to overcome discrimination, or fit into a majority culture. As children stop learning them, the languages slowly wither away.

Why should we care? Because, with the loss of a language comes the loss of inherited knowledge, an entire thought-world. I've often heard it compared to losing a natural resource or an animal species. Yes, we can reconstruct a few extinct languages, and linguists do that; but in the end what we have then is not much more than words on paper. We can't bring back from the dead a society that spoke the language, or the heritage and culture behind it. Once a language is gone, it's gone forever.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Christopher Moseley of the BBC in London. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about languages, visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.