Why speaking many languages

Speaking more than one language could lead to better test scores and even being a more empathetic person

In a café in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter. They are discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. It’s a shame, because their conversation looks fun and interesting, especially to a nosy person like me. But I don’t speak their language.

Out of curiosity, I interrupt them to ask what they are speaking. With friendly smiles, they both switch easily to English, explaining that they had been speaking isiXhosa.

One of the men, Theo, explains: his mother’s language is Sesotho, his father’s is isiZulu, he learned isiXhosa and isiNdebele from his friends and neighbours, and English and Afrikaans at school.

“I went to Germany before I came here, so I also speak German,” he adds.

Was it easy to learn so many languages?

“Yes, it’s normal,” he laughs.

He’s right. Around the world, more than half of people speak at least two languages. Many countries, such as South Africa, have more than one official national language. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority, and perhaps to be missing out.

Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. Moreover, researchers are finding a range of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia.

Could it be that the human brain evolved to be multilingual — that those who speak only one language are not exploiting their full potential?

Iam sitting in a laboratory looking at snowflakes on a computer. As each pair of snowflakes appears, I hear a description of one of them. have to decide which snowflake is being described. The only catch is that the descriptions are in a completely invented language called “Syntaflake”.

It’s part of an experiment by Panos Athanasopoulos, professor of psycholinguistics and bilingual cognition at the United Kingdom’s Lancaster University.

The task is strange and incredibly difficult. Usually, when interacting in a foreign language, there are clues to help you to decipher meaning. The speaker might point to the snowflake as they speak, for example.

Here, I have no such hints.

After a time, I begin to feel a pattern might be emerging with the syntax and sounds. I decide to be mathematical about it and begin to jot down any rules that appear, determined not to “fail” the test.

I chat to Athanasopoulos while my performance is being analysed.

“It’s impossible in the time given to decipher the rules of the language and make sense of what’s being said to you. But your brain is primed to work it out subconsciously. That’s why, if you don’t think about it, you’ll do okay in the test — children do the best.”

The first words ever uttered may have been as far back as 250000 years ago. And when humans had one language, it wouldn’t have been long before we had many.

Language evolution can be compared with biological evolution. Whereas genetic change is driven by environmental pressures, languages change and develop because of social pressures. Over time, different groups of early humans would have found themselves speaking different languages. To communicate with other groups — for trade or travel for instance — it would have been necessary for some members of a family or band to speak other tongues.

“If you look at modern huntergatherers, they are almost all multilingual,” says Thomas Bak, a cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh.

In Aboriginal Australia, where more than 130 indigenous languages are still spoken, multilingualism is part of the landscape. “You will be walking and talking with someone, and then you might cross a small river and suddenly your companion will switch to another language,” Bak explains.

“People speak the language of the earth.”

This is true elsewhere, too. “Consider in Belgium: you take a train in Liège, the announcements are in French first. Then, pass through Loewen, where the announcements will be in Dutch first, and then in Brussels it reverts back to French first.”

Being so bound up with identity, language is also deeply political. The emergence of European nation states and the growth of imperialism during the 19th century meant it was regarded as disloyal to speak anything other than the one national language.

This perhaps contributed to the widely held opinion — particularly in Britain and the United States — that bringing up bilingual children was harmful to their health and to society more generally. There were warnings that bilingual children would be confused by two languages, have lower intelligence and self-esteem, behave in deviant ways, develop a split personality and even become schizophrenic.

It is a view that persisted until very recently, discouraging many parents from speaking their own mother tongue to their children, for instance. This is in spite of a 1962 experiment, ignored for decades but published in the journal Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, that showed that bilingual children did better than monolinguals in both verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests.

However, studies in the past decade using the latest brain-imaging tools are revealing a range of cognitive benefits for bilinguals. It’s all to do with how our ever-flexible minds learn to multitask.

Ask me in English what my favourite food is, and I will picture myself in London choosing from the options I enjoy there. But ask me in French, and I transport myself to Paris, where the options I’ll choose are different.

This idea that you act differently when speaking different languages or even gain a new personality is a profound one.

Athanasopoulos and his colleagues have been studying language’s capacity to change people’s perspectives. In one experiment, English and German speakers were shown videos of people moving, such as a woman walking towards her car or a man cycling to the supermarket. English speakers focus on the action and typically describe the scene as “a woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”.

German speakers, on the other hand, have a more holistic worldview and will include the goal of the action: they might say (in German) “a woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”.

Part of this is owed to the grammatical toolkit available, Athanasopoulos explains. Unlike German, English has the “-ing” ending to describe actions that are ongoing. This makes English speakers much less likely than German speakers to assign a goal to an action when describing an ambiguous scene.

When he tested English–German bilinguals, however, whether they were action- or goal-focused depended on which country they were tested in.

If the bilinguals were tested in Germany, they were goal-focused; in Britain, they were action-focused, no matter which language was used,