In Johannesburg, where they are from, most people speak at least five languages, says one of them, Theo Morris. Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60 to 75 per cent – speak at least two languages. Many countries have more than one official national language – South Africa has 11. 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. Moreover, researchers are finding a swathe 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? 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?
I am sitting in a laboratory, headphones on, looking at pictures of snowflakes on a computer. The only catch is that the descriptions are in a completely invented language called Syntaflake.
It’s part of an experiment by Panos Athanasopoulos, an ebullient Greek with a passion for languages. As you might expect, his lab is a Babel of different nationalities and languages – but no one here grew up speaking Syntaflake.
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.
After a time, though, I begin to feel a pattern might be emerging with the syntax and sounds. I decide to be mathematical about it and get out pen and paper to plot any rules that emerge, determined not to “fail” the test.
The experience reminds me of a time I arrived in a rural town a few hours outside Beijing and was forced to make myself understood in a language I could neither speak nor read, among people for whom English was similarly alien. But even then, there had been clues… Now, without any accompanying human interaction, the rules governing the sounds I’m hearing remain elusive, and at the end of the session I have to admit defeat.
I join Athanasopoulos for a chat while my performance is being analysed by his team.
Glumly, I recount my difficulties at learning the language, despite my best efforts. Students and teaching staff who try to work it out and find a pattern always do worst,” he says.
“It’s impossible in the time given to decipher the rules of the language and make sense of what’s being said to you.
In England, they were action-focused, no matter which language was used, showing how intertwined culture and language can be in determining a person’s worldview.
In the 1960s, one of the pioneers of psycholinguistics, Susan Ervin-Tripp, tested Japanese–English bilingual women, asking them to finish sentences in each language. Another example was “Real friends should…”, which was completed as “help each other” in Japanese and “be frank” in English.
From this, Ervin-Tripp concluded that human thought takes place within language mindsets, and that bilinguals have different mindsets for each language – an extraordinary idea but one that has been borne out in subsequent studies, and many bilinguals say they feel like a different person when they speak their other language.
These different mindsets are continually in conflict, however, as bilingual brains sort out which language to use.
In a revealing experiment with his English–German bilingual group, Athanasopoulos got them to recite strings of numbers out loud in either German or English.
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