The world is growing more global every day. Arguably then, multilingualism is a way of future-proofing yourself. In fact, for more than two thirds of the world’s population multilingualism is already normal. But sadly that statistic does not include the UK nor the USA.¹ The assumption on the Anglophone end is that since most countries speak English there is not much benefit to learning other languages. I’m writing to change a monolingual mind or two.

Using science, a little math, and mostly just my anecdotal observations as a “polyglot” I’m making the case that multilingual people might be smarter, richer, more interesting. (No I didn’t type that with a straight face. But you’re still reading so it worked.) I’ll also challenge some myths about multilingualism. Let’s go!

Multilingualism is good for your brain.

Once, I was talking with a friend about our shared love of podcasts. As we exchanged favourites we realised that whilst we both enjoy the medium, we listen to podcasts in very different ways.

He listens to them whilst whilst working out or driving, things we identified as motor or ‘implicit-memory’ activities. I tend to listen to them whilst carrying out ‘explicit-memory’ activities like working or studying (my line of work is mostly thinking and writing about things). My habit had never struck me as strange or counterintuitive until he expressed that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate. He gave the example that he finds himself turning down the volume or stopping the sound alltogether to read signs and labels properly. Both being curious types, we researched the topic. We found out that this phenomenon is pretty widespread and he doubled down on his doubt that I actually listen to the podcasts. Wryly, I suggested that the people who suffer through my excitable podcast recaps on Instagram stories may disagree. But taking his comment a little more seriously triggered the thought that my preference or ability to listen to podcasts in this way may be related to my multilingualism.

At home I was a studious child belonging to a loud, sociable family that spoke three languages. At school and university I sat regular listening exams for two to four languages at any period. Did these experiences train my brain to process conflicting flows of information with more ease? My armchair neuroscience studies say yes!

Empirical studies do in fact show that multilingualism has positive effects on our grey matter; from improving cognitive functions² to stalling the onset of dementia,³ speaking, reading, and writing in more than one language boosts brain health, gives the brain more exercise, and quite literally makes it grow.⁴

Learning other languages makes you smarter. It’s science. :))))))

Multilingualism increases earning potential.

There is evidence to show that speaking multiple languages increases earning potential at both the individual and societal level. Take Switzerland, the multilingual nation par excellence counting four national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. In Switzerland, languages generate 10% of the GDP. In 2008 that was 38.15bn USD⁵ (or 44.79bn USD in 2019) of economic activity, making the business case for multiple languages clear, and incredibly attractive.

At the individual level, speaking multiple languages makes workers more attractive to employers. Personally, I’ve lost track of how many interviews or presentations I have prepared for only to find that the person hiring me mostly wants to hear about my languages — even when it seemingly isn’t related to the job. In an article published by World Economic Forum, economics specialist Sophie Hardach writes:

Several studies show that languages boost earning power. In Florida, workers who speak both Spanish and English earn $7,000 per year more than those who only speak English. According to a Canadian study, bilingual men earn 3.6% and bilingual women earn 6.6% more than their English-only peers. The twist: this was true even if they didn’t use their second language for work.

“It seems you don’t have to actually speak a second language on the job to reap the financial rewards of being bilingual,” says economics professor Louis Christofides, one of the authors of the study.

Hardach shares how “authors speculated that this was because knowing a second language was seen a sign of cognitive power, perseverance and a good education.”⁶

Learning other languages makes you richer.

Multilingualism improves your understanding of your existing languages

Two of the first few concepts you’ll be introduced to when learning a foreign language are false friends and cognates. False friends occur when words in one language appear similar to words in another but do not share meaning, this often happens due to the two words being cognates, which means they share etymological origin.⁷

Whilst English is not technically my first language, I’m arguably as fluent in it as my mother tongues. My personal experience is that learning 2–3 Romance languages means whenever I come across new words in English, I can figure out their meaning and possible origin due to similar root words across the other languages. Learning about the etymology of words doesn't really happen organically in your first language. You learn to speak it out of the necessity of communicating with other people, making your primary concerns vocabulary and grammar — the parts of language that make it intelligible. The rest? Etymology? Linguistic theories? And all that jazz? Fluff. Really nice fluff in my opinion, but fluff nonetheless.

Speaking other languages and needing or happening to relate ideas causes you to think about the fluff, which often can deepen your understanding.

Multilingualism is seriously misunderstood.

There are many myths and half-truths about multilingualism; their prevalence contributes to many people opting out of learning new languages. For example:

Speaking other languages will make children confused or limit their grasp of their main language.

Sometimes parents who believe this myth do so because they are ethnic minorities experiencing anxiety over whether their children will be able to navigate the dominant society ‘properly.’ Which is intuitive, but not entirely rooted in reality.

Reality: language learning starts in the womb. At birth, babies can differentiate between all 800 of the different sounds that comprise the languages of the world.⁸ As they age, children’s brains specialise to recognise the sounds of the different languages they are exposed to⁹ and they aren’t confused about which language is which or necessarily lacking in vocabulary, they just opt to code-switch because it’s quicker.¹⁰

The best way to become multilingual is to start as a child. Children are like sponges.

Reality: Children aren’t like sponges. It is true that the capacities of language recognition do dwindle as we get older. But even children can be highly resistant to learning new languages for a number of reasons. Professor Erika Hoff of Florida Atlantic University argues that the environment is most important. “There is nothing magical in the child’s brain that allows them to learn any language they hear without lots of environmental support” she shared with Quartz.¹¹

You can become multilingual as an adult. Like most other life skills, it just takes interest, practice, and consistency. Plus you still stand to gain from the benefits mentioned earlier on.

Multilingual people speak their languages equally

This myth is to me equally as amusing as it is tragic. Aneta Pavlenko, author of The Bilingual Mind aptly explains: “if there’s a single factor that stops people learning languages efficiently, it’s that we feel we have to be native-like — it’s an unreachable standard that looms over us.”

Personally, when people realise I don’t speak Mandarin half as well as I speak English even after knowing it for 10 years, they have one of two reactions: a) disappointment and a resignation to not bother/continue learning other languages themselves b) they tell me I’m not really multilingual.

Reality: our grasp of a language depends on our use of it. If you don’t use a language often or at all, even after several years of speaking it, you will forget it. Sometimes in parts. Sometimes entirely. Even if it’s your mother tongue.¹²

Multilingual people have different personalities

Or so we believe!

For a long time it has been debated among epistemologists, philosophers, and linguists whether our language shapes our thought, or if it is our thought that shapes our language. This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In the 1960s, the psycholinguist Susan Ervin-Tripp carried out a study that arguably settles the debate, at least when it comes to multilingual people. Ervin-Tripp observed bilingual women who spoke Japanese and English, giving them the same opening statement in both languages and finding that their endings varied with language.

In Japanese, the statement “when my wishes conflict with my family…” was ended as “it is a time of great unhappiness”; in English, it ended as “I do what I want”.

In a second example “Real friends should…”, was completed as “help each other” in Japanese, by contrast participants ended the statement as “be frank” when it was posed in English.¹³

Ervin-Tripp’s conclusion was that thought occurs within language. My suggestion is that language carries culture; when you speak multiple languages, you take on multiple sensibilities, tastes, priorities – culture. And all of that is instructive in forming identity, or personality. Speaking other languages makes our internal worlds more colourful.

Multilingualism makes our external, shared world more interesting, accessible, and rewarding to us as individuals and societies. The majority of people on our planet are enjoying this.

Any Brits or Americans persuaded to join the fun?

Clap, share, and join me elsewhere! @esmespoke on 👋 Clubhouse | @esmewrote on 📝 Medium | @esmetwote on 🐤Twitter | @esme.gram on 📸 Instagram (help me with a rhyme?)

Sources:

[1] What is the Future of English in the US?

[2] Healthy Bilingual Diet: A Key to Enhancing Our Brain Power and Quality of Life

[3] Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of the symptoms of dementia

[4] Language learning makes the brain grow, Swedish study suggests

[5] Languages generate one tenth of Swiss GDP

[6] Why Speaking More Than One Language Can Boost Economic Growth

[7] Friend or Faux? The Linguistic Trickery of False Friends

[8] EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: CRACKING THE SPEECH CODE

[9–10] Babies’ brains are wired to learn multiple languages at once

[11] A lot of our ideas about bilingual children are total myths

[12] Can you lose your native language?

[13] An Analysis of the Interaction of Language, Topic, and Listener

Like all millennial wisdom, this story begins in an Uber.

Well technically not an Uber, it was a Wheely. But please just buckle up. Let’s think about selfies, self-obsession, storytelling, and the role technology plays in each.

It had been an uphill week. There were meetings that could have been phone calls. Phone calls that could have been emails. Loud maintenance work on my building. Disruptive maintenance work on the train line. An unforeseen resignation in my team. A sick relative. A protest. And plenty of urban foxes. I steeled through irk after irk until Friday evening, the time to unplug. A well-needed face mask and a Netflix marathon? Saturday morning flashed before my eyes. I had groggy bones and that drained feeling you get after sugary snacks and minimal sleep. It was off-putting enough. So I went to dinner instead.

On the ride back home I caught myself smiling. My batteries were fully charged. It was soul-stretching to put on some glad rags, eat good food, chatter, and shimmy the evening away. There I was, an introvert who chose the outside over her bed and ArcherFX (before the writers started struggling). And felt better off for it? Counterintuitive! I slid my phone out to capture a reminder to self. Forgetting to switch my phone to silent mode, the obnoxiously loud shutter alerted my driver to what was happening. Dark skin doesn’t quite blush, but my cheeks and ears were sufficiently heated.

“Are you taking a selfie Miss?”

“Mmhmm!”

“Did you get it? I can slow down or wait.”

I was a little surprised by his warm tone. I expected mild reproach, perhaps an assuming lecture about vanity and what I’ll have left when my beauty and youth fades. You know? Any of the usual spiels you get as a young person liking herself or her life in public.

You’re likely familiar with the rebuke: “be present!”, wielded whenever someone draws for their phone during dinner or a holiday. Think about how many people you know who “hate Instagram” because it’s “so fake.” Granted, between the Starbucks chroniclers, besotted new parents, face-masking Netflixers, and that one friend who is always on a plane, ‘Selfie Culture’ can be a little banal. It grates on the nerves of self-suggested higher-minded people. Some Selfie Culture detractors think they make a groundbreaking or noble argument whenever they decry social media and technology for apparently deleterious effects on ‘real life.’

But the argument is neither groundbreaking nor noble. It’s tired.

Selfie Culture is Not New or Bad

The average person isn’t using laborious photography equipment in the moments when they are not being “present”. With a smart phone or modern camera, images are captured in a matter of moments and then people tend to get on with living. For the most part, to be present and to be kodak-happy is not mutually exclusive. Only a luddite would insist otherwise.

Yet even if we do take away modern technology, history indicates documenting our existence has long been part of the human disposition.

Old Practice, New Format

Humans like to navel-gaze. Take the prehistoric man drawing scenes of himself on the walls of his cave. Fast forward to the Sumerian Epics. Whizz through the medieval monarchs who commissioned songs, murals, and portraits immortalising life as they knew it. Pause at the 15th century and you’ll find a celebrated canon of renaissance artists and writers spending the next 300 years utterly obsessed with themselves. The evidence is clear. Modern technology did not create the “pics or it didn’t happen” mentality; a human need for preserving memory did — a long time before smartphones.

What technology has done, is advance and democratise the activity of documenting life. Creating and telling stories is no longer the reserve of powerful kings, aristocrats, or wealthy people otherwise. If this sounds aggrandizing, you probably underestimate the Internet. From memes regularly influencing conversations in mainstream media, to viral moments ending up as life and work opportunities, anybody with a smartphone or access to social media can add their story to the human tapestry, shaping reality by degrees, in real time. In this way, I see technology as a wonderfully good thing.

Selfie Culture is Overstimulating, What is the Next Step?

It is reasonable to argue that modern technology and social media have together left us overstimulated. Past generations are documented to have felt the same about video, radio, newspapers, and so on and so forth. It is as true now as it was then that we should moderate our consumption. But this is an individual responsibility. Creators shouldn’t stop creating on account of consumers who fail to moderate.

Selfie Culture, modern technology, social media, and whatever comes next from the human need to create stories; the thing can only be as bad for you as you make it.

Clap, share, and join me elsewhere! I’m @esmetwote on Twitter.

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