Authors: Michael Erard
Ganahl lays out how, in the medieval period, people learned other languages, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, and Arabic, in order to access culturally powerful religious and scientific texts. (This reading and translating paradigm would have guided Giuseppe Mezzofanti in the outset of his career.) In the nationalist era in Europe, the languages dissected and offered
in schools were ones that reflected national consciousness. Later, during the age of exploration, colonization, and empire building, some Europeans learned and studied the languages of distant places in service of subjugating them, at the same time that colonial subjects were learning the languages of their rulers.
Today, Ganahl argues, it’s all about tourism, migration, and in particular, shopping—language
learning has been brought to the nexus of the consumer and the consumed, where the strength of one’s abilities in a language are verified by how convincingly you can portray a tourist, a shopkeeper, hotel owner, or day laborer. Leave behind the smooth politenesses of the diplomat, the invisibility of the spy, or the abstruse etymological tricks of the Orientalist; those model performances
aren’t relevant any longer. In touristic, commercial contexts, native speakers of those languages get used to non-native speakers’ accents and grammar, changing (if not lowering) the bar for their visitors’ language performances. The irony, Ganahl says, is that the instant gratification of shopping is antagonistic to the persistence required for language learning. Buying a shiny new dictionary
or downloading a podcast for language X may feel good. It’s not language acquisition, though.
Rainer’s history has a European frame, but statistics show that migration
and tourism trends will continue worldwide as he laid them out. Between 1960 and 2005, the number of worldwide migrants doubled, from 75 million in 1960 to 191 million in 2005. World Bank statistics from 2005 show that of the top
ten migration corridors (not including Russia), six of them involved movement between countries with different national languages.
*
The bulk moved within Europe/Central Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, which means that people from predominantly multilingual countries headed to other multilingual countries. One can speculate that they added to their linguistic repertoires as they went.
As for tourism, in 2008, there were 924 million international tourists, but the World Tourism Organization anticipates 1.6 billion a year by 2020. (Only 25 million tourists traveled in 1960—a 3,596 percent increase between then and now!) Any growth in tourism creates a surge in language learning, as more vendors and workers will want to speak the language of their customers. The emergence of global
English is part of this trend as well. To native English speakers, the story is about the popularity of English, which reaffirms the centrality of American economic and military power (and provides for the Brits a glimpse of bygone glory). For the rest of the world, it’s about trying to reduce linguistic friction, enabling one to move wherever, talk to whomever, and sell to whomever.
Hovering
in the background of Ganahl’s essay is the necessity of brain plasticity.
†
I call this relentless linguistic adaptation the “will to plasticity.” This phrase deliberately echoes German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous phrase “will to power,” the underlying force that drives human individuals, societies, and even the natural world away from static states of existence. In the twenty-first
century, our version of
this appears to be the “will to plasticity,” where “plasticity” is decidedly neurological. The will to plasticity is the “incessant augmentation” of circuits in the brain—among them, language circuits. “Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain,” wrote Harvard neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, “and represents evolution’s invention to enable the nervous system”
to adapt to new environments.
You can see the will to plasticity all over the language realm. Bestselling self-help guru Tim Ferriss published “language hacking” guides on his website that promise to help you learn a language in three months. A New York–based writer, Ellen Jovin, has a blog that describes her project to study thirteen languages in three years and to write a book about it. In
relatively quick succession, two memoirs of foreign-language learning by American women were published,
Dreaming in Hindi
by Katherine Russell Rich and
Dreaming in Chinese
by Deborah Fallows.
Less visible but highly fascinating is an international language-learning club I stumbled across called the Hippo Family Club, which was founded in 1981 by an iconoclastic Japanese educator named Yo Sakakibara.
His fascination with language-learning methods and his devotion to global harmony were summed up in a motto: “Anyone can speak seven languages.” In my brief sojourn among the Hippos, I didn’t meet anyone who speaks seven languages, but the friendly, fun social atmosphere makes members think they could achieve that.
Reading up on Hippo (as it’s known in Japan, South Korea, and Mexico; in the States,
it’s called the Lex Language Project), I found an enthusiasm for duplicating a child’s linguistic experience. “Our research shows that anyone, at any age, can acquire new languages. Unfortunately, the way most people usually attempt to learn a language, in a traditional classroom, does not provide a conducive setting for language acquisition. Infants don’t learn their native language by breaking
the language down into little pieces of grammar and vocabulary, or by looking in a dictionary, so why should a child or adult learn other languages that way either?”
*
Hippos—as members call themselves—attend weekly sessions where they sing songs, play games, and recite stories in a core set of languages. At home, they’re supposed to keep their language CDs playing constantly in the background;
on the CD, one story after another is told in a rotating set of languages, including your own.
*
These broad associations are known as the “big waves,” in which you get the intonation of sentences. Eventually, they say, you’ll get the “small waves,” which are the individual sounds, as well as meanings.
Intrigued by the approach, I decided to visit the Hippo Club in Chihuahua, Mexico, where I stayed
with a family and met a number of people in their club. Some adults told me that they’d been listening to French or Japanese stories on their CDs, when suddenly they realized, “I know what that means!” They felt the transformation to be so remarkable because they hadn’t done any active study—they’d learned “naturally.” Hippos are adamant that the club doesn’t “teach” them. Whenever I used the
word
teach,
people bristled. We don’t “teach” language, they’d say; they prefer to say they “encourage.” The method, which is resolutely antischool, bills itself as not having tests, grades, or teachers. Likewise, Hippos don’t “learn” language, they “acquire” language. We become like babies, we absorb language the way babies absorb it.
One wants to know, does it work? Elizabeth Victor, Lex Language
Project’s executive director, says that she can speak “about” five languages. She explained: “I can do business in Japanese, I can find lost luggage in Spanish and French, I can make friends in Chinese, and beyond that I can say ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘I’m tired’ and maybe understand things that people say to me.” To her, “speaking” a language means she can converse and communicate—not that she’s
fluent or “near-native.” Unfortunately, because Hippos are adamantly opposed to testing, the organization has no evidence how well this environment works.
One goal in Chihuahua was to look for these outcomes. I spent some time talking to a pretty Japanese teenager, Tomoko Suzuki, who should
be a model example of what Hippo membership can produce. Because her father, Kenshi Suzuki, is the head
of the Japanese Hippo organization and Yo Sakakibara’s successor, she’s grown up at Hippo Club meetings, CDs playing in the background all the time with a steady stream of foreign visitors in her house. Her parents even met each other at a Hippo meeting.
“How many languages did you grow up with?” I asked her.
“I grew up with nineteen languages,” she replied. “Basically Japanese, but basically
nineteen languages.” Her abilities in about a dozen of these (including Russian, Malaysian, French, and Mandarin) are limited to reciting the Hippo creed. Yet several years of living in the United States have made her English nearly accentless. I met her in Mexico because she happened to be three months into a yearlong exchange program. The Mexican Hippos all praised her Spanish; she sounds just
like a Chihuahuan, they said (for instance, she can say the
ch
sound like
sh
). Nevertheless, the Hippo method couldn’t prevent a mishap that often befalls learners of third languages: her languages kept intruding on one another. The first time she’d called her parents on the phone, she couldn’t remember any Japanese, and when I interviewed her in a coffee shop, her Spanish kept popping out.
“Would you say that you can speak Russian?” I asked.
“No, I only know how to introduce myself,” she said. “But I’m still speaking one different language and for me, is
muy,
uh, very special.”
Later that night, I was able to see the Hippo scene close up. In Chihuahua, in the meeting was held in a long, concrete room with an iPod plugged into a public address system at the front. About a half-dozen
families filtered in and greeted each other, the kids breaking off immediately to play with each other, the adults introducing themselves to me in English, and when they discovered that I knew some Spanish, switching back and forth. The meeting began with the club leader, a man named Miguel Duran, punching in songs in German, Chinese, English, and Japanese, each of which incited arm waving, hip
swinging, and fast stepping. Unaccustomed to this behavior, I followed the other adults, who hokey-pokeyed with as much abandon as the kids. Then we sat in a circle and passed around a microphone to individuals who had
memorized specific speeches or stories in various languages. Children boldly grabbed the microphone first, sometimes sitting on their parents’ laps, and recited their speeches unabashed.
When the microphone came to me, I thought I’d show off a bit and introduced myself in both Spanish (which had been warmed up already) and Mandarin. At the end, everyone clapped.
We were doing something part language karaoke, part Romper Room, part linguistics crossroads. Standing in the circle, everyone’s bits of languages were made relevant, even honored. The positive feedback from the group
would presumably encourage individuals to do more. From what I could hear of pronunciations, they didn’t sound precise. I’m not sure this mattered. Here were linguistic outsiders creating a convivial social inside for themselves.
After the meeting was a tamale dinner in my honor, which gave me a chance to talk to the parents. One father was a systems engineer; another was a pharmaceutical salesman;
another was an industrial engineer. The economics of their pursuit turned out to be more relevant than the psychology of it. These were middle-class Mexicans who belong to churches but who don’t have social ties that give them outlets for their aspirations, which are only tangentially about language. If they were richer, they’d send their kids abroad to camps and schools; if they were poorer,
they’d be too busy to come to class.
They come because they want their kids to have more languages than just English, to be more than bilingual. Their parents want them to be economically competitive, and they realize that everyone else in the world speaks English, too. Miguel Duran told me that people do join Hippo because they think it’ll benefit their English, but
poco a poco
it becomes less
about English, and more about other languages. As one of the fathers said to me, “I don’t want to learn seven languages—I want to grow the ones I have. But the idea is that someone can’t know where they’re going, or what languages they’re going to encounter.” As an anthropologist named Chad Nilep who has studied the Hippos told me, not everyone is able to think of themselves as multilingual. But
what the club does, through its openhearted pseudo-immersion, is to license people as multilingual—and therefore as citizens of the world.
The motivation to be cosmopolitan, not just an English-flavored version but a polyglot version of it, has a spot on the time line of multilingualism’s political evolution. Go back to prehistory, a time of linguistic wildness, when we can imagine that each
roving band of humans grunted its own dialect, and uncountable versions of half-congealed speech codes could be overheard at every cave and watering hole. Any one of these codes had a range, not a center nor an edge; not until bands clashed, merged, or partnered and settled into villages did they acquire a physical place, a homeland. Over thousands of years, these became city-building empires that
swept many languages away. On borders and in cities, people spoke several languages; so did those moving through cities—merchants, explorers, officials, and religious itinerants; so did women who were married to men in other groups; so did elites; so did everyone in geographically isolated places where trading and navigating required knowing the languages of one’s equally isolated neighbors.
All this was endangered, thousands of years later, in the era of the nation. For a period of about 250 years, monolingualism became the standard model in most places, because the boundaries of the nation were drawn to include all the people who spoke alike. This unity was threatened by multilingualism and its taint of barbarity, impurity, and unnatural mixing.
Fast-forward to the end of the cold
war, when the primacy of the nation-state had broken down. Money, information, and labor were seeking ways to flow unimpeded through national boundaries. The melting pot—the social crucible that created monolinguals and sorted multilinguals—no longer resembled the ideal image of progress and harmony. Linguistic heterogeneity had blossomed anew. Along with a newfound pride in various ethnic identities
came an awareness of the historic cost of speaking only one’s mother tongue. It looked as if the linguistic future for humanity was one in which language could slip the ties of place as in the primordial past. Even after moving from their homelands, families stayed in touch using phones and computers and remained connected to the cultural products of home through satellite television. This
increased their willingness to migrate and blunted the force of assimilation. For those who lived far from borders, those same
tools imported cultural and linguistic diversity and the cultural capital promised by such diversity.