Let me return to Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto which I read some weeks ago. As I wrote in an earlier dispatch, I was completely captivated by this unusual account of a hostage situation. One character that fascinated me was the hostage Gen Watanabe, a multilingual translator who constantly finds himself in the middle of the action as terrorists, hostages, and negotiators ask him to translate for them.
As readers, we don’t know how many languages Gen speaks exactly. But in a scene in a bar that takes place years before the terrorists’ assault, Gen lists them, categorizing them in the ones he speaks extremely fluent, very fluent, fluent, passable, and could read. “He knew more languages than there were specialty cocktails listed in the Plexiglass holder on the table,” Patchett writes. So it is fair to assume that he is what is called a hyperpolyglot.
Whereas bilingual people speak two languages and multilingual people speak at least three, hyperpolyglots know 11 languages or more, according to a common definition. (Some scientists would even like to increase the threshold number to at least 20.) The term was coined by a British linguist two decades ago, as the journalist Judith Thurman explains in a fabulous article about the topic in The New Yorker.
Being able to speak several languages is something many people find fascinating, me included, and dabbling in a new language is a popular pastime. Who has not tried to quickly pick up some foreign terms on Duolingo before a vacation, if only to be able to order a pastis in French or ask your Portuguese Airbnb host for a restaurant recommendation? In many parts of our globalized world, bilingualism (and even multilingualism) is the rule, not the exception, experts tell us, and many people learn a second or third language at home or school.
But hyperpolyglots are language learners on a different level, as Thurman makes clear in her fascinating report. She profiles Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, a Peruvian with a command of 22 living languages plus knowledge of six classical or endangered ones. At the time of her article, the 27-year-old linguist is pursuing his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. Thurman and Rojas-Berscia travel together to Malta so that she can observe how he goes about learning a new language, starting with a basic “hello.”
How do people become hyperpolyglots? What drives them to commit to this “herculean feat”? And what can they teach the rest of us? Thurman tries to answer these questions during her quest, in which she meets with hyperpolyglots and interrogates researchers who study them. Scientific evidence is still scarce, and many questions are open. But extraordinary language abilities seem to have a genetic base, likely mixed with environmental and cultural influences, as Thurman explains.
There is an additional factor, however, that might be more difficult to measure. Thurman calls it hyperpolyglots’ obsession. Take Rojas-Berscia. He grew up in Lima in an educated trilingual household, Thurman writes. His father is a Peruvian businessman, his mother is of Italian origin, and his grandmother, who cared for him as a boy, taught him Piedmontese. Plus, he started learning English in preschool. Maltese, along with Uighur and Sanskrit, had been on his wish list for a while. Why these languages, Thurman asks.
“What happens is this,” he says, over dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Nijmegen, where he was chatting in Mandarin with the owner and in Dutch with a server, while alternating between French and Spanish with a fellow-student at the institute. “I’m an amoureux de langues. And, when I fall in love with a language, I have to learn it. There’s no practical motive—it’s a form of play.”
Learning a language as a form of play, how does that work in practice? When Rojas-Berscia and Thurman arrive in Malta, the taxi driver assumes they are mother and son, a welcome invitation for Rojas-Berscia to ask him in English: “How do you say ‘mother’ in Maltese?” By the time they have reached the hotel, he knows words for the whole Maltese family, Thurman recounts. In the lobby, they meet a newlywed couple, still in their wedding clothes, and Rojas-Berscia doesn’t waste a minute to ask: “How do you say ‘congratulations’?”
Next, Rojas-Berscias sets about to hire a personal trainer as a language guide; a gym is a good place to get the prepositions for direction, he explains. When this plan falls through, Thurman suggests they find somebody at the university. But he dismisses the idea because he tries to avoid intellectuals. “You want the street talk, not book Maltese,” he says.
Thurman relates more details about what she calls his ‘impromptu approach’:
He spent several days raptly eavesdropping on native speakers in markets and cafés and on long bus rides, bathing in the warm sea of their voices. If we took a taxi to some church or ruin, he would ride shotgun and ask the driver to teach him a few common Maltese phrases, or to tell him a joke. He didn’t record these encounters, but in the next taxi or shop he would use the new phrases to start a conversation.
Reflecting on her own attempt to learn Vietnamese via Duolingo, Thurman concludes: “You have to inhabit a language, not only speak it, and fluency requires some dramatic flair. I should have been hanging out in New York’s Little Saigon, rather than staring at a screen.”
Of course, as a researcher Rojas-Berscias has gained expertise that goes beyond what is available to you and me. Here he explains how he does fieldwork on indigenous tongues where he might not be able to refer to a common language like English:
It is harder, but it’s beautiful. You start by making bonds with people, learning to greet them appropriately, and observing their gestures. The rules of behavior are at least as important in cultural linguistics as the rules of grammar. It’s not just a matter of finding the algorithm. The goal is to become part of a society.
Still, even if we don’t have the knowledge and experience of a linguist, what if we all saw language learning as a form of social play, as a way to bond and connect? Instead of learning foreign words with an app, we could check out a Spanish- or Chinese-speaking Meetup group. Instead of falling back on the ubiquitous English when we travel internationally, we could actually try to use the few scraps of French or Portuguese we know. It might feel scary at first, but I bet in the long run, it is not only more effective but also more fun.
See you next week!
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