And when humans had one language, it wouldn’t have been long before we had many. The first words ever uttered might have been as far back as 250,000 years ago, once our ancestors stood up on two legs and freed the ribcage from weight-bearing tasks, allowing fine nerve control of breathing and pitch to develop. That’s why, if you don’t think about it, you’ll do OK in the test. But your brain is primed to work it out subconsciously. “It’s impossible in the time given to decipher the rules of the language and make sense of what’s being said to you. Students and teaching staff who try to work it out and find a pattern always do worst,” he says. But it appears that was where I went wrong: “The people who perform best on this task are the ones who don’t care at all about the task and just want to get it over as soon as possible. I join Athanasopoulos and glumly recount my difficulty in learning the language, despite my best efforts. Studies suggest bilingual people think differently according to the language they are using. By the end of the session, I have to admit defeat. Here, I have no such clues and, it being a made-up language, I can’t even rely on picking up similarities to languages I already know. The speaker might point to the snowflake as they speak, use their hands to demonstrate shapes or their fingers to count out numbers, for example. Usually, when interacting in a foreign language, there are clues to help you decipher the meaning. The task is profoundly strange and incredibly difficult. As you might expect, his lab is a Babel of different nationalities and languages, but no one here grew up speaking Syntaflake. Professor of psycholinguistics and bilingual cognition at Lancaster University, he’s at the forefront of a new wave of research into the bilingual mind.
It’s part of an experiment by Panos Athanasopoulos, an ebullient Greek with a passion for languages. The only catch is that the descriptions are in a completely invented language called Syntaflake. All I have to do is decide which snowflake is being described. As each pair of snowflakes appears, I hear a description of one of them through the headphones. I am sitting in a laboratory, headphones on, looking at pictures of snowflakes on a computer.
BILINGUAL VS MONOLINGUAL BRAIN FULL
Moreover, researchers are finding a swath of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia.Ĭould it be that the human brain evolved to be multilingual, that those who speak only one language are not exploiting their full potential? And in a world that is losing languages faster than ever – at the current rate of one a fortnight, half our languages will be extinct by the end of the century – what will happen if the current rich diversity of languages disappears and most of us end up speaking only one? Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority and perhaps to be missing out. People are increasingly expected to speak, read and write at least one of a handful of “super” languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish or Arabic, as well.
Many countries have more than one official national language – South Africa has 11. Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60-75% – speak at least two languages. To communicate for trade, travel and so on, it would have been necessary for early humans to speak other tongues Was it easy to learn so many languages? “Yes, it’s normal,” he laughs.
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