https://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/myths_en.

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Myths about bilingualism

François Grosjean 
University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland 

A number of myths about bilingualism are discussed in my new book, Bilingual: Life and Reality (Harvard University
Press, 2010). They are summarized here.  

Bilingualism is a rare phenomenon. WRONG. It has been estimated that more than half the world's population is
bilingual, that is lives with two or more languages. Bilingualism is found in all parts of the world, at all levels of
society, in all age groups. Even in countries with many monolinguals, the percentage of bilinguals is high. For
example, one can estimate that there are as many as 50 million bilinguals in the United States today. 

Bilinguals acquire their two or more languages in childhood. WRONG. One can become bilingual in childhood, but
also in adolescence and in adulthood. In fact, many adults become bilingual because they move from one country (or
region) to another and have to acquire a second language. With time, they can become just as bilingual as children
who acquire their languages in their early years (minus the native speaker accent). In general, people become
bilingual because life requires the use of two or more languages. This can be due to immigration, education,
intermarriage, contact with other linguistic groups within a country, and so on. 

Bilinguals have equal and perfect knowledge of their languages. WRONG. This is a myth that has had a long life! In
fact, bilinguals know their languages to the level that they need them. Some bilinguals are dominant in one
language, others do not know how to read and write one of their languages, others have only passive knowledge of a
language and, finally, a very small minority, have equal and perfect fluency in their languages. What is important to
keep in mind is that bilinguals are very diverse, as are monolinguals. 

Real bilinguals have no accent in their different languages. WRONG. Having an accent or not in a language does not
make you more or less bilingual. It depends on when you acquired your languages. In fact, some extremely fluent
and balanced bilinguals have an accent in the one, or the other, language; other, less fluent, bilinguals may have no
accent at all. 
 
Bilinguals are born translators. WRONG. Even though bilinguals can translate simple things from one language to
another, they often have difficulties with more specialized domains. The reaction people have is almost always, "But
I thought you were bilingual!". In fact, bilinguals use their languages in different situations, with different people, in
different domains of life (this is called the complementarity principle). Unless they learned their languages formally
(in school, for example), or have trained to be translators, they often do not have translations equivalents in the
other language. 

Mixing languages is a sign of laziness in bilinguals. WRONG. Mixing languages such as code-switching and borrowing
is a very common behavior in bilinguals speaking to other bilinguals. It is a bit like having coffee with milk instead of
just straight black. The two language repertoires are available in bilingual situations and can be used at will. Many
expressions and words are better said in the one or the other language; mixing permits to use the right one without
having recourse to translation which simply may not do justice to what one wants to express. This said, in other
situations, bilinguals know that they cannot mix their languages (e.g. when speaking to monolinguals) and they then
stick to just one language.  

Bilinguals are also bicultural. WRONG. Even though many bilinguals are also bicultural (they interact with two
cultures and they combine aspects of each), many others are monocultural (e.g. the inhabitants in the German
speaking part of Switzerland who often acquire three or four languages during their youth). Thus one can be
bilingual without being bicultural just as one can be monolingual and bicultural (e.g. the British who live in the USA).  
Bilinguals have double or split personalities. WRONG. Bilinguals, like monolinguals, adapt their behavior to different
situations and people. This often leads  to a change of language in bilinguals (e.g. a Japanese-English bilingual
speaking Japanese to her grandmother and English to her sister). This change of language has led to the idea that
bilinguals are "different" when speaking the one, or the other, language. But like monolinguals, it is the situation or
the person one is speaking to which induces slight changes in behavior, opinions, feelings, etc., not the fact that one
is bilingual. 

Bilinguals express their emotions in their first language. WRONG. Some bilinguals have grown up learning two
languages simultaneously and hence have two first languages with which they will express their emotions. And for
the majority of bilinguals who have acquired their languages successively—first one language and then, some years
later, another—the pattern is not clear. Emotions and bilingualism produce a very complicated but also very
personal reality that has no set rules. Some bilinguals prefer to use one language, some the other, and some use
both of them to express their feelings and emotions.

Children

Bilingualism will delay language acquisition in children. WRONG. This is a myth that was popular back in the middle
of the 20th Century. Since then much research has shown that bilingual children are not delayed in their language
acquisition. This said, one should keep in mind that bilingual children, because they have to deal with two or more
languages, are different in some ways from monolingual children, but definitely not on rate of language acquisition.
As for bilingual children with language challenges (e.g. dyslexia), they are not proportionally more numerous than
monolingual children with the same challenges. 

The language spoken in the home will have a negative effect on the acquisition of the school language, when the
latter is different.WRONG. In fact, the home language can be used as a linguistic base for acquiring aspects of the
other language. It also gives children a known language to communicate in (with parents, caretakers, and, perhaps,
teachers) while acquiring the other.

If parents want their children to grow up bilingual, they should use the one person - one language
approach. WRONG. There are many ways of making sure a child grows up bilingual: caretaker 1 speaks one language
and caretaker 2 speaks the other; one language is used in the home and the other outside the home; the child
acquires his/her second language at school, etc. The critical factor is NEED. The child must come to realize, most of
the time unconsciously, that he/she needs two or more languages in everyday life. This is where the one person -
one language approach often breaks down as the bilingual child quickly realizes that the weaker (often minority)
language is not really needed (the caretakers or other family members often speak the other, stronger language, to
one another, so why keep up the weaker language?). A better approach is that all family members use the weaker
language at home, if at all possible, so as to increase the child's exposure to it and mark the language's "main"
territory.  

Children raised bilingual will always mix their languages. WRONG. If bilingual children interact in both bilingual and
monolingual situations, then they learn to mix languages at certain times only. When they are with monolinguals
(e.g. Grandma who doesn't speak any English), they quickly learn to speak just the one language (communication
breaks down otherwise). It is important though that the situation be  truly monolingual (and not a "pretend
situation" in which a bilingual parent pretends  not to know the other language); children will make an effort to
speak only one language if they feel it is vital for communication. Thus, caretakers will want to create natural
monolingual environments where children will need, and hence use, just one language. 
https://www.francoisgrosjean.ch/bilingualism_is_not_en.html

What bilingualism is NOT

François Grosjean is Professor Emeritus at Neuchâtel University (Switzerland) and the author of Bilingual: Life and
Reality (Harvard University Press, 2010)

August 2010

I have had the chance to live and work for extended periods of time in at least three countries, the United States,
Switzerland and France, and as a researcher on bilingualism, it has allowed me to learn a lot about my topic of
interest. I have found that people in these countries share many misconceptions about bilingualism and bilinguals
but that they also have very country-specific attitudes towards them. 

Among shared misunderstandings, one is that bilingualism is a rare phenomenon. In fact, it has been estimated that
more than half of the world's population is bilingual, that is uses two or more languages in everyday life. Bilingualism
is found in all parts of the world, at all levels of society, in all age groups. Another common misconception is that
bilinguals have equal knowledge of their languages. In fact, bilinguals know their languages to the level that they
need them and many are dominant in one of them. 

There are also the myths that real bilinguals do not have an accent in their different languages and that they are
excellent all-around translators. This is far from being true. Having an accent or not does not make one more or less
bilingual, and bilinguals often have difficulties translating specialized language. Then there is the misconception that
all bilinguals are bicultural (they are not) and that they have double personalities (as a bilingual myself, and with a
sigh of relief, I can tell you that this is not the case).  

As concerns children, many worries and misconceptions are also widespread. The first is that bilingualism will delay
language acquisition in young children. This was a popular myth in the first part of the last century, but there is no
research evidence to that effect. Their rate of language acquisition is the same as that of their monolingual
counterparts. There is also the fear that children raised bilingual will always mix their languages. In fact, they adapt
to the situation they are in. When they interact in monolingual situations (e.g. with Grandma who doesn't speak
their other language), they will respond monolingually; if they are with other bilinguals, then they may well code-
switch. Finally, there is the worry that bilingualism will affect negatively the cognitive development of bilingual
children. Recent research appears to show the contrary; bilingual children do better than monolingual children in
certain cognitive tasks.  

Aside from these common misunderstandings, certain attitudes are specific to countries and areas of the world. In
Europe, for example, bilingualism is seen favorably but people have very high standards for who should be
considered bilingual. The latter should have perfect knowledge of their languages, have no accent in them, and even,
in some countries, have grown up with their two (or more) languages. At that rate, very few people consider
themselves bilingual even though, in Switzerland for example, the majority of the inhabitants know and use two or
more languages in their everyday life.  

How about the United States? Einar Haugen, a pioneer of bilingualism studies, has stated that the US has probably
been the home of more bilingual speakers than any other country in the world. Bilingualism here is very diverse,
pairing English with Native American languages, older colonial languages, recent immigration languages, and so on.
This said, it is not very extensive at any one time. Currently, only 17% of the population is bilingual as compared to
much higher percentages in many other countries of the world. This is not due to the fact that new immigrants are
not learning English. The reason, rather, is that bilingualism is basically short-lived and transitional in this country.
For generations and generations of Americans, bilingualism has covered a brief period, spanning one or two
generations, between monolingualism in a minority language and monolingualism in English. 

The tolerance that America has generally shown towards minority languages over the centuries has favored the
linguistic integration of its speakers. As sociologist Nathan Glazer writes, the language of minorities "shriveled in the
air of freedom while they had apparently flourished under adversity in Europe". 

When presidential candidate Barak Obama stated that children should speak more than one language, he was
probably referring to the paradox one finds in this country: on the one hand, the world's languages brought to the
United States are not maintained, and they wither away, and on the other hand only a few of them are taught in
schools, to too few students, and for too short a time. A national resource - the country's knowledge of the
languages of the world - is being put aside and is not being maintained.   

It is important to stop equating bilingualism with not knowing English and being un-American. Bilingualism means
knowing and using at least two or more languages, one of which is English in the United States. Bilingualism allows
you to communicate with different people and hence to discover different cultures, thereby giving you a different
perspective on the world. It increases your job opportunities and it is an asset in trade and commerce. It also allows
you to be an intermediary between people who do not share the same languages. 

Bilingualism is a personal enrichment and a passport to other cultures. At the very least, and to return to Barak
Obama's comment, it certainly allows you to say more than "merci beaucoup" when interacting with someone of
another language. One never regrets knowing several languages but one can certainly regret not knowing enough.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/256407-mapping-the-bilingual-brain

Mapping the Bilingual Brain

December 12, 2012

By Chris Berube

( Jean & Nathalie / flickr/CC-BY-2.0 )

I was recently introduced to a friend’s five-year-old daughter, and I’m already living in her shadow. She is being
raised with not one, not two, but three languages. I began calculating how soon this child would know more total
vocabulary than I do, and realized it’s probably already happened.

Nothing makes you feel intellectually insecure like finding out that a child might be smarter than you. But I found
some small relief in talking with psychologist and noted researcher Ellen Bialystock, who studies the effects of
language on the brain.

“Look, I will never say that bilingual kids are smarter,” says Bialystock, from York University in Toronto, Canada, after
I repeatedly peppered her with the question. “That’s something you can never say.”

Phew!
My relief, however, was cut short as Bialystock continued:

“What we can say is that some of the cognitive processes that are part of intelligence are more developed in
bilinguals.”

So what, exactly, does that mean?

Brain Changer

A common view before the 1960s was that teaching a kid more than one language at a young age was confusing.
Behavioral studies at the time posited that young minds weren’t developed enough to handle so much information,
and that bilingualism was disorienting for children. Since then, countless studies have shown that young brains are a
lot more adaptable than old school social scientists gave them credit for being. Learning multiple languages won’t
confuse a child, or an adult learner: bilingualism actually reshapes the brain.

(A quick note here: when I refer to “bilingualism,” I’m not talking about taking a couple of Spanish classes so you can
order a torta  with confidence; most of the cognitive benefits I’m about to point out only happen for people who are
certifiably bilingual -- people who pass fluency tests, things like that.)

In one study carried out by Cathy Price, a neuroimaging researcher at University College London, it was discovered
that bilinguals had more gray matter in their posterior supramarginal gyrus, a long name for the ridged part of the
brain that researchers have associated with vocabulary acquisition.

“When you learn more language, your posterior supramarginal gyrus will get a workout, and be stimulated to grow,”
says Price. “When you look at the images, there is more gray matter density with more than one language spoken.”
The image below is just one of the brain scans Price's team took of a bilingual brain; it shows the same brain, from
three different angles, with the yellow spot identifying the area of the brain where they've seen thickening:

Since gray matter makes up a good portion of the nerve cells within the brain, the more gray matter in that particular
gyrus, the faster and more accurately your brain will perform certain tasks. For example, there is evidence that
bilingual brains are better at doing tasks where conflicting information has to be processed. In one study, Ellen
Bialystok subjected a group of 5 year olds -- some bilingual, some monolingual -- to something called "Simon Tests,"
which are used to determine how quickly people can respond to confusing stimulus. For example, you might be
asked to push a button with your right hand that triggers a light on the left side of your field of view - things like that
which feel unnatural. The bilinguals, on the whole, were much better at the tests, which suggests they are much
better at sorting out conflicting information.

Since the bilingual brain is adept at suppressing the language that isn’t being used in a given moment, it has
experience inhibiting unhelpful information and promoting important stuff. There are lots of benefits to this -- one
study found that bilinguals were more able to filter out ambient noise. Speaking two languages means you feel less
overwhelmed when trying to order in a busy restaurant, and makes you more capable of talking to someone on a
crowded subway.

Price is quick to point out that, at best, any benefits are minimal. Bilinguals are only a few milliseconds faster at
sorting information, but, hey, that adds up!

“Bilingualism is an experience,” says Bialystock, and just like any other exercise (e.g., dancing, knitting, using sign
language) it re-wires the brain, forming new neurons and new connections.

Preventative medicine

While many contemporary studies have linked bilingualism with a better-performing brain, more recently, a few
researchers have begun exploring the question of whether language proficiency affects disease outcomes -- does
bilingualism, in other words, help stave off certain illnesses? Bialystok has studied people suffering from dementia
and she believes that the healthier bilingual brain actually weathers the ravages of aging better than a monolingual
one.

In one experiment published in 2012, Bialystock examined the brain scans of 40 patients diagnosed with probable
Alzheimer’s disease. “For our test subjects, we had people with the same level of disease, at exactly the same age,”
says Bialystok. They all showed approximately the same symptoms. Their brains, therefore, should look pretty much
the same. But what Bialystok found was surprising.

Traditionally, the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s atrophies as neurons die: the brain’s outer layer begins to
shrink, and the hippocampus withers. When Bialystok compared the brains of 40 patients, she found that the brains
of the bilinguals in the study showed twice as much atrophy as the monolinguals. But despite having far more
diseased brains, they had performed as well on cognitive tests as the monolinguals with less diseased brains.

What? With more atrophy, you’d expect the disease to be further along -- you'd expect those patients to have
more  problems functioning day-to-day. But for the bilinguals, it wasn’t, and they didn’t. Bialystok has undertaken a
couple of similar studies in the last few years, and every time, she’s found the same result: language multiplicity
appears to hold off the effects of dementia. In one examination of 211 probable Alzheimer’s patients, the effect
was so great, she found that the bilingual patients had reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later than the
monolingual ones.

Bialystock is the first to say that, while her studies are promising, they aren’t definitive. “There are lots of questions
here,” Bialystock says. “Like, why would bilingualism fight Alzheimer’s anyway?” But she believes it has something to
do with how language re-wires us.

Who's smarter?

That's all good news for that five year old, though I still wanted to know if she was smarter than me.

The closest I could come to an objective measurement was IQ scores...and well, I won't get into the caveats and
thorniness of using IQ to measure anything, let alone how smart you are. Quite a few studies explicitly draw a
parallel between bilingualism and a high IQ score, but researchers are quick to point out that such a relationship is
not perfect.

“One of the IQ tests is a vocabulary test, and in general, we might expect bilinguals to do slightly worse on a
[vocabulary] test in one language than if it was their only language,” says Price. 

The reason for this vocab disparity is that bilinguals learn and use each language “for different purposes, in different
domains of life,” according to a book by french linguist Francois Grosjean. A kid might learn and use different
languages for home and school, which means that, because of context, they won’t get the full vocabulary of either
place. Kind of a, “Jack of all trades, a master of none” scenario.

“Bilinguals have a larger vocabulary, since they speak two languages,” says Price, “but they might know fewer words
within a language.” 

It seems nit-picky to me to say that a bilingual individual might be at a disadvantage because they don’t speak as
many words in each  of their languages, and I think it’s fair to say that the cognitive benefits of bilingualism probably
outweigh the slight disadvantage they face on a test that is often discredited. Which again is good news for the
multilinguals, but not for me and my monolingual ego. And it’s going to be hard to make up for lost time: researchers
show that it’s tougher to fluently learn a second or third or fourth language as you age, meaning that adult learners
might have a hard time getting the sweet, sweet cognitive advantages that bilingual children enjoy. Even if I start
now, I may never catch that kid.
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/11/14/244813470/new-study-shows-brain-benefits-of-bilingualism

New Study Shows Brain Benefits Of Bilingualism

November 14, 20133:59 PM ET

BARBARA J. KING

An Indian schoolgirl dressed as Telugu Talli poses for the camera during a celebration in Hyderabad, home to a study
that seems to show the onset of dementia is delayed for people who speak more than one language.

Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images

The largest study so far to ask whether speaking two languages might delay the onset of dementia symptoms in
bilingual patients as compared to monolingual patients has reported a robust result. Bilingual patients suffer
dementia onset an average of 4.5 years later than those who speak only a single language.

While knowledge of a protective effect of bilingualism isn't entirely new, the present study significantly advances
scientists' knowledge. Media reports emphasize the size of its cohort: 648 patients from a university hospital's
memory clinic, including 391 who were bilingual. It's also touted as the first study to reveal that bilingual people who
are illiterate derive the same benefit from speaking two languages as do people who read and write. It also claims to
show that the benefit applies not only to Alzheimer's sufferers but also people with frontotemporal and vascular
dementia.

Only when I read the research report itself, though, published in the journal Neurology and written by Suvarna Alladi
and 7 co-authors, did I realize fully the brilliance of conducting this study in Hyderabad, India.

That choice of location, I believe, lends extra credibility to the study's results.

Here's why. India, as the researchers note, is a nation of linguistic diversity. In the Hyderabad region, a language
called Telugu is spoken by the majority Hindu group, and another called Dakkhini by the minority Muslim population.
Hindi and English are also commonly spoken in formal contexts, including at school. Most people who grow up in the
region, then, are bilingual, and routinely exposed to at least three languages.

The patients who contributed data to the study, then, are surrounded by multiple languages in everyday life, not
primarily as a result of moving from one location to another. This turns out to be an important factor, as the authors
explain:

In contrast to previous studies, the bilingual group was drawn from the same environment as the monolingual one
and the results were therefore free from the confounding effects of immigration. The bilingual effect on age at
dementia onset was shown independently of other potential confounding factors, such as education, sex,
occupation, cardiovascular risk factors, and urban vs rural dwelling, of subjects with dementia.

In other words, thanks in large part to the study's cultural context, these researchers made great progress zeroing in
on bilingualism as the specific reason for the delay in dementia symptoms.
What exactly is it about the ability to speak in two languages that seems to provide this protective effect? Alladi and
co-authors explain:

The constant need in a bilingual person to selectively activate one language and suppress the other is thought to
lead to a better development of executive functions and attentional tasks with cognitive advantages being best
documented in attentional control, inhibition, and conflict resolution.

Intriguingly, when a patient speaks three (or more) languages, no extra benefits accrue neurologically. Speaking a
single language beyond one's native tongue is enough to do the trick.

So, now, my almost-monolingual brain is jealous.

I do know some conversational French, and I squeaked by speaking and comprehending enough Swahili to be polite
and interactive while living in Kenya. But I've regretted not working up to full fluency in a second language. (As the
"Learn to Speak Italian" tapes strewn around my house demonstrate, I haven't given up on this goal.)

The sounds of multiple languages swirling around me when I visit New York or Parisare enchanting, and I enjoy
discussing with bilinguals the claims that switching between languages allows different personality traits to
emerge within a single individual.

Being bilingual opens up new worlds of global connection and understanding, and almost certainly allows some
degree of flexibility in personal expression, too.

Now we know, more concretely and convincingly than before, that there's a brain benefit to bilingualism, too.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160811-the-amazing-benefits-of-being-bilingual

The Amazing Benefit of Being Bilingual

Most people in the world speak more than one language, suggesting the human brain evolved to work in multiple
tongues. If so, asks Gaia Vince, are those of us who speak only one language missing out?

 By Gaia Vince

12 August 2016

In a cafe in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter, tossing words back and forth.
Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud guffaws. They are
discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. It’s a shame, because their conversation looks
fun and interesting, especially to a nosy person like me. But I don’t speak their language.

Out of curiosity, I interrupt them to ask what they are speaking. With friendly smiles, they both switch easily to
English, explaining that they are South Africans and had been speaking Xhosa. In Johannesburg, where they are from,
most people speak at least five languages, says one of them, Theo Morris. For example, Theo’s mother’s language is
Sotho, his father’s is Zulu, he learned Xhosa and Ndebele from his friends and neighbours, and English and Afrikaans
at school. “I went to Germany before I came here, so I also speak German,” he adds.

Was it easy to learn so many languages?

“Yes, it’s normal,” he laughs.

He’s right. 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. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the
minority, and perhaps to be missing out.

Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. Moreover, researchers
are finding a swathe of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and
delayed onset of dementia.

At the current rate, half our languages will be extinct by the end of the century

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?

As adults, we try desperately to decipher a foreign tongue - but we may learn quicker if we stop looking for patterns
that aren't there (Credit: Getty Images)

I am sitting in a laboratory, headphones on, looking at pictures of snowflakes on a computer. As each pair of
snowflakes appears, I hear a description of one of them through the headphones. All I have to do is decide which
snowflake is being described. 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. Professor of
psycholinguistics and bilingual cognition at Lancaster University, he’s at the forefront of a new wave of research into
the bilingual mind. As you might expect, his lab is a Babel of different nationalities and languages – but no one here
grew up speaking Syntaflake.

The task is profoundly strange and incredibly difficult. Usually, when interacting in a foreign language, there are clues
to help you decipher the meaning. 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. 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. 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. 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.
But your brain is primed to work it out subconsciously. That’s why, if you don’t think about it, you’ll do okay in the
test – children do the best.”

Language is intimately connected to culture and politics (Credit: Getty Images)

The first words ever uttered may 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.
And when humans had got one language, it wouldn’t have been long before we had many.

Language evolution can be compared to biological evolution, but whereas genetic change is driven by environmental
pressures, languages change and develop through social pressures. Over time, different groups of early humans
would have found themselves speaking different languages. Then, in order to communicate with other groups – for
trade, travel and so on – it would have been necessary for some members of a family or band to speak other
tongues.

We can get some sense of how prevalent multilingualism may have been from the few hunter-gatherer peoples who
survive today. “If you look at modern hunter-gatherers, they are almost all multilingual,” says Thomas Bak, a
cognitive neurologist who studies the science of languages at the University of Edinburgh. “The rule is that one
mustn’t marry anyone in the same tribe or clan to have a child – it’s taboo. So every single child’s mum and dad
speak a different language.”

In Aboriginal Australia, where more than 130 indigenous languages are still spoken, multilingualism is part of the
landscape. “You will be walking and talking with someone, and then you might cross a small river and suddenly your
companion will switch to another language,” says Bak. “People speak the language of the earth.” This is true
elsewhere, too. “Consider in Belgium: you take a train in Liège, the announcements are in French first. Then, pass
through Loewen, where the announcements will be in Dutch first, and then in Brussels it reverts back to French
first.”

The connection with culture and geography is why Athanasopoulos invented a new language for the snowflake test.
Part of his research lies in trying to tease out the language from the culture it is threaded within, he explains.

Being so bound up with identity, language is also deeply political. The emergence of European nation states and the
growth of imperialism during the 19th century meant it was regarded as disloyal to speak anything other than the
one national language. This perhaps contributed to the widely held opinion – particularly in Britain and the US – that
bringing up children to be bilingual was harmful to their health and to society more generally.

There were warnings that bilingual children would be confused by two languages, have lower intelligence and
behave in deviant ways

There were warnings that bilingual children would be confused by two languages, have lower intelligence, low self-
esteem, behave in deviant ways, develop a split personality and even become schizophrenic. It is a view that
persisted until very recently, discouraging many immigrant parents from using their own mother tongue to speak to
their children, for instance. This is in spite of a 1962 experiment, ignored for decades, which showed that bilingual
children did better than monolinguals in both verbal and non-verbal intelligence tests.

However, research in the last decade by neurologists, psychologists and linguists, using the latest brain-imaging
tools, is revealing a swathe of cognitive benefits for bilinguals. It’s all to do with how our ever-flexible minds learn to
multitask.

Split personality

Ask me in English what my favourite food is, and I will picture myself in London choosing from the options I enjoy
there. But ask me in French, and I transport myself to Paris, where the options I’ll choose from are different. So the
same deeply personal question gets a different answer depending on the language in which you’re asking me. This
idea that you gain a new personality with every language you speak, that you act differently when speaking different
languages, is a profound one.

Athanasopoulos and his colleagues have been studying the capacity for language to change people’s perspectives. In
one experiment, English and German speakers were shown videos of people moving, such as a woman walking
towards her car or a man cycling to the supermarket. English speakers focus on the action and typically describe the
scene as “a woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”. German speakers, on the other hand, have a more holistic
worldview and will include the goal of the action: they might say (in German) “a woman walks towards her car” or “a
man cycles towards the supermarket”.

Part of this is due to the grammatical toolkit available, Athanasopoulos explains. Unlike German, English has the -ing
ending to describe actions that are ongoing. This makes English speakers much less likely than German speakers to
assign a goal to an action when describing an ambiguous scene. When he tested English–German bilinguals,
however, whether they were action- or goal-focused depended on which country they were tested in. If the
bilinguals were tested in Germany, they were goal-focused; 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. She found that the women ended the sentences very
differently depending on which language was used. For example, “When my wishes conflict with my family…” was
completed in Japanese as “it is a time of great unhappiness”; in English, as “I do what I want”. Another example was
“Real friends should…”, which was completed as “help each other” in Japanese and “be frank” in English.

Many bilinguals say they feel like a different person when they speak their other language

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 personwhen 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. This effectively “blocked” the other language altogether, and when
they were shown the videos of movement, the bilinguals’ descriptions were more action- or goal-focused depending
on which language had been blocked. So, if they recited numbers in German, their responses to the videos were
more typically German and goal-focused. When the number recitation was switched to the other language midway,
their video responses also switched.

Searching for a word in one language - while suppressing the corresponding word in another - gently taxes the brain,
helping to train our concentration (Credit: Getty Images)

So what’s going on? Are there really two separate minds in a bilingual brain? That’s what the snowflake experiment
was designed to find out. I’m a little nervous of what my fumbling performance will reveal about me, but
Athanasopoulos assures me I’m similar to others who have been tested – and so far, we seem to be validating his
theory.

In order to assess the effect that trying to understand the Syntaflake language had on my brain, I took another test
before and after the snowflake task. In these so-called flanker tasks, patterns of arrows appeared on the screen and
I had to press the left or right button according to the direction of the arrow in the centre. Sometimes the
surrounding pattern of arrows was confusing, so by the end of the first session my shoulders had been hunched
somewhere near my ears and I was exhausted from concentrating. It’s not a task in which practice improves
performance (most people actually do worse second time round), but when I did the same test again after
completing the snowflake task, I was significantly better at it, just as Athanasopoulos has predicted.

How to learn 30 languages

So-called "hyper-polyglots", like Alex Rawlings mentioned in this story, have learnt to speak at least 10 languages.
They claim that anyone could learn their skills if only you take the right approach. To learn more, read our in-depth
feature article here.

“Learning the new language improved your performance second time around,” he explains. Relieved as I am to fit
into the normal range, it’s a curious result. How can that be?

The flanker tasks were exercises in cognitive conflict resolution – if most of the arrows were pointing to the left, my
immediate impulse was to push the left button, but this wasn’t the correct response if the central arrow was
pointing right. I had to block out my impulse and heed the rule instead. Another example of cognitive conflict is a
test in which the names of colours are written in different colours (“blue” written in red, for example). The aim is to
say which colour each word is written in, but this is tricky, because we read the word much quicker than we process
the colour of the letters. It requires considerable mental effort to ignore the impulse just to say the word we can’t
help but read.

The part of the brain that manages this supreme effort is known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), part of the
“executive system”. Located on the frontal lobe, it is a toolbox of mental attention skills that enables us to
concentrate on one task while blocking out competing information, and allows us to switch focus between different
tasks without becoming confused. It is the executive system that tells us to go when we see a green light and stop
for a red, and it is the same system that tells us to ignore the meaning of the word we read but concentrate on the
colour of the letters.

The snowflake test prepared my ACC for the second flanker task, just as speaking more than one language seems to
train the executive system more generally. A steady stream of studies over the past decade has shown that bilinguals
outperform monolinguals in a range of cognitive and social tasks from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they
can read other people. Greater empathy is thought to be because bilinguals are better at blocking out their own
feelings and beliefs in order to concentrate on the other person’s.

“Bilinguals perform these tasks much better than monolinguals – they are faster and more accurate,” says
Athanasopoulos. And that suggests their executive systems are different from monolinguals’.

Mental muscles

In fact, says cognitive neuropsychologist Jubin Abutalebi, at the University of San Raffaele in Milan, it is possible to
distinguish bilingual people from monolinguals simply by looking at scans of their brains. “Bilingual people have
significantly more grey matter than monolinguals in their anterior cingulate cortex, and that is because they are
using it so much more often,” he says. The ACC is like a cognitive muscle, he adds: the more you use it, the stronger,
bigger and more flexible it gets.

Bilinguals, it turns out, exercise their executive control all the time because their two languages are constantly
competing for attention. Brain-imaging studies show that when a bilingual person is speaking in one language, their
ACC is continually suppressing the urge to use words and grammar from their other language. Not only that, but
their mind is always making a judgement about when and how to use the target language. For example, bilinguals
rarely get confused between languages, but they may introduce the odd word or sentence of the other language if
the person they are talking to also knows it.

“My mother tongue is Polish but my wife is Spanish so I also speak Spanish, and we live in Edinburgh so we also
speak English,” says Thomas Bak. “When I am talking to my wife in English, I will sometimes use Spanish words, but I
never accidentally use Polish. And when I am speaking to my wife’s mother in Spanish, I never accidentally introduce
English words because she doesn’t understand them. It’s not something I have to think about, it’s automatic, but my
executive system is working very hard to inhibit the other languages.”

For bilinguals, with their exceptionally buff executive control, the flanker test is just a conscious version of what their
brains do subconsciously all day long – it’s no wonder they are good at it.
Speaking a second language can help forestall the symptoms of dementia (Credit: Getty Images)

A superior ability to concentrate, solve problems and focus, better mental flexibility and multitasking skills are, of
course, valuable in everyday life. But perhaps the most exciting benefit of bilingualism occurs in ageing, when
executive function typically declines: bilingualism seems to protect against dementia.

Psycholinguist Ellen Bialystok made the surprising discovery at York University in Toronto while she was comparing
an ageing population of monolinguals and bilinguals.

“The bilinguals showed symptoms of Alzheimer’s some four to five years after monolinguals with the same disease
pathology,” she says.

Being bilingual didn’t prevent people from getting dementia, but it delayed its effects, so in two people whose brains
showed similar amounts of disease progression, the bilingual would show symptoms an average of five years after
the monolingual. Bialystok thinks this is because bilingualism rewires the brain and improves the executive system,
boosting people’s “cognitive reserve”. It means that as parts of the brain succumb to damage, bilinguals can
compensate more because they have extra grey matter and alternative neural pathways.

“Bilinguals use their frontal processors for tasks that monolinguals don’t and so these processors become reinforced
and better in the frontal lobe. And this is used to compensate during degeneration of the middle parts of the brain,”
Bialystok explains. However, it is no good simply to have learned a little French at school. The effect depends on how
often you use your bilingual skill. “The more you use it, the better,” she says, “but there’s no breaking point, it’s a
continuum.”

Bilingualism can also offer protection after brain injury. In a recent study of 600 stroke survivors in India, Bak
discovered that cognitive recovery was twice as likely for bilinguals as for monolinguals.

Such results suggest bilingualism helps keep us mentally fit. It may even be an advantage that evolution has
positively selected for in our brains – an idea supported by the ease with which we learn new languages and flip
between them, and by the pervasiveness of bilingualism throughout world history. Just as we need to do physical
exercise to maintain the health of bodies that evolved for a physically active hunter-gatherer lifestyle, perhaps we
ought to start doing more cognitive exercises to maintain our mental health, especially if we only speak one
language.

In recent years, there has been a backlash against the studies showing benefits from bilingualism. Some
researchers tried and failed to replicate some of the results; others questioned the benefits of improved executive
function in everyday life. Bak wrote a rejoinder to the published criticisms, and says there is now overwhelming
evidence from psychological experiments backed by imaging studies that bilingual and monolingual brains function
differently. He says the detractors have made errors in their experimental methods.

One estimate puts the value of knowing a second language at up to $128,000 over 40 years

Bialystok agrees, adding that it is impossible to examine whether bilingualism improves a child’s school exam results
because there are so many confounding factors. But, she says, “given that at the very least it makes no difference –
and no study has ever shown it harms performance – considering the very many social and cultural benefits to
knowing another language, bilingualism should be encouraged”. As for the financial benefits, one estimate puts the
value of knowing a second language at up to $128,000 over 40 years.

Immersing children in a second language may help benefit their performance in all subjects (Credit: Getty Images)

The result of my test in Athanasopoulos’s lab suggests that just 45 minutes of trying to understand another language
can improve cognitive function. His study is not yet complete, but other research has shown that these benefits of
learning a language can be achieved quickly. The problem is, they disappear again unless they are used – and I am
unlikely to use the made-up snowflake language ever again! Learning a new language is not the only way to improve
executive function – playing video games, learning a musical instrument, even certain card games can help – but
because we use language all the time, it’s probably the best executive-function exerciser there is. So how can this
knowledge be applied in practice?

One option is to teach children in different languages. In many parts of the world, this is already being done: many
Indian children, for example, will use a different language in school from their mother or village tongue. But in
English-speaking nations, it is rare. Nevertheless, there is a growing movement towards so-called immersion
schooling, in which children are taught in another language half the time. The state of Utah has been pioneering the
idea, with many of its schools now offering immersion in Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.

“We use a half-day model, so the target language is used to teach in the morning, and then English is used in the
afternoon – then this is swapped on other days as some learn better in the morning and some in the
afternoon,” explains Gregg Roberts, who works with the Utah Office of State Education and has championed
immersion language teaching in the state. “We have found that the kids do as well and generally better than
monolingual counterparts in all subjects. They are better at concentrating, focusing and have a lot more self-esteem.
Anytime you understand another language, you understand your language and culture better. It is economically and
socially beneficial. We need to get over our affliction with monolingualism.”

The immersion approach is being trialled in the UK now, too. At Bohunt secondary school in Liphook, Hampshire,
head teacher Neil Strowger has introduced Chinese-language immersion for a few lessons.
Immersing yourself in a new language and culture may open your mind to new ways of thinking (Credit: Getty
Images)

I sit in on an art class with 12-year-olds being taught by two teachers: one speaking English, the other Chinese. The
children are engaged but quiet, concentrating on the task of learning multiple ideas. When they speak it is often in
Chinese – and there is something rather surreal about watching young people in the UK discussing British graffiti
artist Banksy in Mandarin. The children say they chose to learn in Chinese because they thought it would be “fun”
and “interesting” and “useful” – a far cry from the dreary French lessons I endured at school.

The majority of the art class will take their Chinese GCSE exams several years early but Strowger tells me the
programme has had many benefits in addition to their grades, including improving students’ engagement and
enjoyment, increasing their awareness of other cultures so that they are equipped as global citizens, widening their
horizons, and improving their job prospects.

What about those of us who have left school? In order to maintain the benefits of bilingualism, you need to use your
languages and that can be tricky, especially for older people who may not have many opportunities to practise.
Perhaps we need language clubs, where people can meet to speak other languages. Bak has done a small pilot study
with elderly people learning Gaelic in Scotland and seen significant benefits after just one week. Now he aims to
carry out a much larger trial.

It is never too late to learn another tongue, and it can be very rewarding. Alex Rawlings is a British professional
polyglot who speaks 15 languages: “Each language gives you a whole new lifestyle, a whole new shade of meaning,”
he says. “It’s addictive!”

“People say it’s too hard as an adult. But I would say it’s much easier after the age of eight. It takes three years for a
baby to learn a language, but just months for an adult.”

As the recent research shows, that’s a worthwhile investment of time. Being bilingual could keep our minds working
longer and better into old age, which could have a massive impact on how we school our children and treat older
people. In the meantime, it makes sense to talk, hablar, parler, sprechen, beszel, berbicara in as many languages as
you can.

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This  article  first appeared on  Mosaic  and is republished here under a Creative Commons  licence.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-35170392/the-advantages-of-a-bilingual-brain

Benefits of Bilingualism: (Audio BBC) Parte 1

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03stqfh

Benefits of Bilingualism: (Audio BBC) Parte 2

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03tknz9