Some are children of enterprising immigrants or embattled refugees. Others live along borders or are part of a minority that keeps its heritage while blending into the mainstream. Still others have spent years memorizing vocabulary lists and parsing sentences. All told, half of the world's population conducts life in multiple languages.
Bilingualism doesn't just apply to the small percentage of people who are perfectly fluent in two tongues. Bilinguals might speak beautifully in one language without being able to read or write it. And they may have acquired their second tongue as a child, a teen, or an adult.
People who are bilingual are often asked which language they think in, but when people are walking down the street, riding a bus, or jogging in the woods, their thoughts may not be in a particular language, points out Francois Grosjean, author of the research-based Bilingual Life and Reality. "Thought can be visual-spatial and nonlinguistic. It is only when planning to speak that individual languages actually intervene," Grosjean says.
While they do repress words in one tongue in order to speak another, bilinguals don't completely lose access to the first. For example, bilingual subjects reading sentences with cognates—examples would be "bleu" in French and "blue" in English—take less time to process them than other words, hinting at how they are always dipping into their total language knowledge. And they often intermingle their languages (Spanglish, Chinglish), not out of laziness or lack of ability, but in a natural quest for optimal self-expression and understanding.
Infants as young as 4 months who live in bilingual environments can distinguish between two languages, monitoring lip and facial movements. Babies also show a strong preference for the language their mother spoke during pregnancy. We're built to acquire language, of course, but we're also built to learn and accommodate more than one. Monolinguals are essentially underutilizing their abilities: Brain scans show that while monolinguals use established language centers such as Broca's area, bilinguals employ far more of the neural landscape when expressing themselves.
Contra conventional wisdom, bilingual children are not delayed in language acquisition.In fact, words learned before age 5 have an added emotional kick, regardless of how many languages are learned. Because the young child's brain is developing so quickly, across so many regions, the words learned during this critical period carry thick visual and emotional associations. For English speakers, "knife" is encoded not just as the utensil itself, but also as a cold, shiny, sharp, and dangerous object. Later-life linguistic associations aren't as rich: a knife is pretty much just a knife. That's why some people feel more emotional resonance in their native tongue.
Bilingual brains are fitter, too. A Canadian study showed that using two languages throughout life delays the onset of dementia symptoms by an average of four years. Bilingualism enhances attention and cognitive control in kids and adults. Also, bilinguals are better at learning additional languages, even if those languages bear little resemblance to the ones they already know.
Likely due to the fact that they've developed areas in their brains that lay relatively dormant in monolinguals, bilinguals seem to have abilities unrelated to language acquisition. They are better at divergent thinking tasks, for example, which require one to process unrelated concepts. Bilingual children are able to analyze language on a meta-linguistic level, detecting whether a speaker avoids redundancy and whether he or she follows conversational rules, such as not interrupting, more readily than do their monolingual peers. This ability probably derives from the fact that bilingual children intuitively understand that any given language is just one form of communication, a means to an end; they can therefore be more more "topdown"in evaluating how a conversation plays out.
Language acquisition is intellectually fascinating. And yet the circumstances under which most people acquire multiple languages are matters of visceral drama: Families uprooted by immigration and dreams pursued in a distant land. Four such journeys are recounted on these pages.
Flossie Wong-Staal
Profession: Biologist / Languages: Cantonese, English, Mandarin
Last summer, Flossie Wong-Staal and her husband toured the lake-filled Yellow Mountain area of China. "The local children saw my [American] husband and shouted, 'The hellos are coming!' 'Hellos' was the only part of that sentence they said in English. It's their generic term for foreigners. It was so cute."
Later during the trip, in Shanghai, Wong-Staal dined with her sister and friends. "Most of them did not speak English. I spoke Cantonese with friends from Hong Kong, Mandarin with friends from the mainland. Some Shanghainese, which I can understand but can't speak, was thrown into the mix, too. It was a lot of fun. It's so enjoyable to have the freedom and ability to switch from one language or dialect to another."
Wong-Staal travels to China at least once a year, often to speak at scientific conferences. A top molecular biologist, she was on the team that first cloned the HIV virus. Her work led to the development of the first treatments for AIDS patients. Currently she runs her own company, iTherX, in San Diego, and is testing a promising drug for hepatitis C.
