Nice view if you can get it

How can two languages co-exist in the same brain? Tim Smith-Laing on the superpower of bilingualism

ITHE BILINGUAL BRAIN by Albert Costa 176pp, Allen Lane, £20, ebook £9.99

n the central London primary school where I teach one day a week, around two thirds of the children live their lives in two or more languages. When I asked a class of eightyear-olds to help me put the numbers 1 to 10 up on the board in the languages they knew, we ran out of time before we could get through them all. By the end of the hour, the board had Polish, Italian, Arabic, Kurdish, Bengali, Pashto and Hindi on it. Had we had more time, we could have added Korean and Spanish, too. I do not mind admitting that, at times, it seems slightly redundant to be teaching the same children Latin as a basis for expanding their English grammar and literacy.

If two thirds of a class seems like a lot, it probably should not. While there is little pressure on Britons and Americans to learn foreign languages, Albert Costa points out in The Bilingual Brain that “the majority of the world’s population can communicate in more than one language”. Though a certain amount depends on how you choose to define bilingualism, it is, in global terms, “the rule rather than the exception”. So while my class might seem out of the ordinary in Britain – where only 38 per cent of us speak a language in addition to English – they are entirely representative of the wider world. Just like them, two thirds of children across the world are raised in bilingual environments.

Those of us who were born into the other, monoglot third, and who have struggled to learn foreign languages to any degree of competence later in life, may well be jealous. It is, of course, possible to learn a language almost as well as a native speaker – Joseph Conrad, for instance, took up English in his 20s, and went on to become one of the greatest prose stylists ever to have written in it. But it is also an enormous challenge: learning, understanding and replicating the grammar, phonological properties and everyday pragmatics of languages to fluency as an adult is no mean feat. Even Conrad, rather comfortingly, never lost what was by all accounts a nearly impenetrable Polish accent. For my own part, I have recently been trying to brush up the Japanese I spent three months learning and 12 years forgetting. After several months of daily sessions, my app informs me that I now know nearly all the ideograms that would be familiar to a Japanese six-year-old. Nearly. To be born into a language is to be a fish in water; to learn one is like wading through treacle.

Not for nothing, then, is bilingualism sometimes talked about as something akin to a superpower. Whether it actually is, though, is another question. Indeed, as The Bilingual Brain makes clear, it is a whole slew of questions. In the first place, given that it is the norm in much of the world’s population, “Is there anything special about being bilingual?” If there is, and given the vast amount of information implicated in “knowing” a language, how do two languages coexist in the same brain? Does such coexistence confer, beyond communicative flexibility, tangible cognitive benefits, or might it, in fact, do the opposite, and bring cognitive disadvantages? In either case, how exactly might it affect decision-making, the attentional system or even the development of neurodegenerative diseases?

The slight issue with The Bilingual Brain is that there are, in fact, rather more questions than there are answers. Before his premature death in 2018, Costa was a leading researcher in the field of psycholinguistics, and this book approaches its subject with a scientific caution and care that is by turns admirable and frustrating. The five chapters are dedicated successively to the early formation of bilingual babies’ brains; the representation of languages in adult brains; the effects of

After months of daily practice, my app says I have the Japanese of a typical six year old

Ted Lewis’s masterpiece GBH was published 40 years ago this week, to general indifference. Lewis’s assiduous biographer Nick Triplow rehearses the sad trajectory of his career in the introduction to this new edition: at the start of the Seventies he looked set for stardom when his thriller Jack’s Return Home was filmed as Get Carter, but the reading public spurned his gritty tales of British gangsters; his sideline as a writer for Doctor Who ended because his scripts were too dark; and he was an alcoholic back living with his mother in Bartonupon-Humber when GBH, his ninth and final novel, appeared. He died in 1982, aged 42.

It’s the sort of fate that often awaits artistic pioneers. We are readier now than we were in 1980 for this tale of porn magnate George Fowler, who blithely tortures, or worse, anybody who might threaten the success of his business. It’s a twisted love story, as Fowler and his wife Jean bond over a common taste for brutality.

But Fowler’s account of their gory glory days alternates with scenes set later on, when he is in hiding, drunken and alone, in the grim haven of out-of-season Mablethorpe, on the Lincolnshire coast.

On a technical level, the book is outstanding: Lewis knows just how to handle his double timeline without losing pace; he judges perfectly when to horrify the reader and when to hold back. Perhaps much of the novel’s power is due to the way in which Fowler’s situation – a sodden has-been exiled from his London friends – is mined from Lewis’s own. But the book is also hugely funny and zestful: Lewis’s delight in his complex double-cross plot and low-life characters is infectious, and there is poetry in his stark evocation of Lincolnshire’s desperate tattiness. It’s equal parts suicide note and celebration of the human ability to find reasons to keep going.