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?

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.
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 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. 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.
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.

Taken from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160811-the-amazing-benefits-

of-being-bilingual