Authors: Michael Erard
A couple of streets over, my hosts Sri and Kala,
*
a retired couple in their sixties, have returned from yoga class for breakfast. They live in
a big house with a rooftop garden, ceiling fans, televisions, and a kitchen shrine that befits their Brahmin roots. Sri used to be a manager at a manufacturing company. A short, round man with a sharp jut to his lower lip, he laughs easily, loves a joke, and loves to eat. At breakfast he pulls out a jar of chutney and adds a creamy glop to my plate; every lunch ends with a rich, cardamom-infused ghee
dessert or ice cream that he’s forbidden to eat for health reasons. Slender Kala, trained as a botany professor, spent time every morning threading white jasmine blossoms into a garland for her kitchen shrine while watching Hindi soap operas.
Enthusiastic to begin, I asked our hosts about their language repertoires on the first morning. The glimpse left me hungry for what else we’d find. Though
their mother tongue is Tamil, they speak to each other in Hindi. When they were first married, this surprised Kala. Hindi was the language they would have likely spoken outside the family. “I thought, why is he talking to me as if I’m a friend?” she says. They also speak English—it takes a day to adjust to their accents, but they seem to have no problem understanding me or my wife, who had joined
me for this leg of the journey.
The whirl of languages gets more complicated. Sri also uses Hindi with his two grown sons. With one of his daughters-in-law, he uses Tamil and English; he speaks in Kannada with the other. With his sisters he uses Tamil, though with one of his nieces, he speaks in Telugu. He speaks in Kannada with Kala’s sisters. Though he speaks Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu,
and English, he reads and writes only in Hindi and English.
Kala’s language life was a bit more easily mapped. She talks to her sons and one daughter-in-law in Tamil; with the other, in Kannada. With her own sister, she uses Kannada. She also knows Telugu, Hindi, and English. She watches Hindi soap operas and reads the newspapers
in Hindi and English; out in the markets she uses Telugu, the language
of the state.
The morning we mapped this out, my head swam; it seemed so much like the intersection at the Hotel Diamond Point. How do they know what language to use with whom? How do they know who they are in each language? Is that even relevant? What order underlies this apparent chaos?
On that first morning, I explained to Sri and Kala why I had come. I’m writing a book about people who can
speak a lot of languages, I said—like, dozens of languages. I knew there are places where it’s common for everyone to speak a lot of languages, but I didn’t know anything about them.
Many of the same myths about multilinguals applied to hyperpolyglots. Maybe, by looking at one, you might get closer to the other. One myth about multilinguals was that they can use all their languages equally well.
Another was that they have one cultural background per language. Yet another was that they know languages somehow imperfectly, and that imperfect knowledge couldn’t count. I surmised that hyperpolyglots were more different from multilinguals, though, who were numerous and also lived in communities that develop a shared standard for what it means to speak those languages. Rooted in such a sensibility,
they beget more multilinguals. And, while polyglots fade in and out of the historical record, multilingual communities have been around forever, direct descendants of the time before civilizations tamed our tongues.
India isn’t the only place where one finds multilingualism. One of the best-known multilingual hot spots exists, or used to exist, in the northwestern Amazon basin. The American anthropologist
Arthur Sorensen made the tribes who live there famous in the late 1960s. “In the central part of the Northwest Amazon, there is a large multilingual area encompassing many tribes, each possessing its own language, where almost every individual is polylingual—he knows three, four, or more languages well,” Sorensen wrote in an article about the place. At the time, about ten thousand people
lived along the Vaupés River, in
an area the size of New England. There, each one of twenty-five tribes has its own language, which (among other things) determines whom an individual can marry, because individuals have to marry outside of their language groups. As a result, children grow up at least bilingual, and perhaps learn other languages from people who live around them. This outmarriage
system powers the quadrilingualism that Sorensen observed, though some individuals speak more. Linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald reported meeting someone in the Vaupés who spoke ten languages well.
Yet the timeless multilingualism of Amazonian hunter-gatherers is, well, neither. (Hunting-and-gathering is also on the decline.) To prepare to go there myself, I interviewed Jean Jackson, an MIT anthropologist
who did fieldwork in the Vaupés in the 1970s. She told me that the marriage system isn’t millennia old, but is a more recent adaptation to migration pressures and population declines, which emerged about a hundred years ago. That system itself is on its way out, broken by outside pressures; very few people speak four languages fluently anymore. Bilingualism is still prevalent, but increasing
numbers of people rely on Tukano, the language of the most populous tribe, as a lingua franca. Even if I could have gotten around the problem of not knowing any of the local languages, I would have found very little there that I hoped to see.
Another of the world’s linguistic hot spots is the Mandara Mountains in northern Cameroon, where the average mountain tribesperson speaks three languages;
many speak five or six. What this means in reality, reports Ohio State University anthropologist Leslie Moore, is that a typical person will “speak only two or three of them well and have stronger receptive than productive skills in the other languages.” Like a hyperpolyglot, it didn’t seem unusual, at least for multilinguals in this part of the world, to know lots of bits of lots of languages.
Another expert on the same area, anthropologist Scott MacEachern, has described the multilingualism as very old; people have spent centuries trading, warring, intermarrying, jockeying for political advantage. Connections to the outside world have encouraged some people to learn more languages. Take as an example a man in his mid-twenties, Michel Kourdapaye, who worked as a translator for MacEachern.
He
“speaks
pelasla, wuzlam,
and French fluently,” MacEachern wrote. “He also speaks
mada, wandala,
and Fulbe with varying levels of efficiency; as is usual, he can understand the latter languages rather better than he can speak them. He can also understand some
muyan
. He insists that his linguistic facility is not very unusual in the region.” (The italics are MacEachern’s.) Such an expansive repertoire
is more common among younger men, who learn more languages in order to take advantage of opportunities beyond the mountains, the anthropologist added. Before European contact, he supposed, speaking three or four languages was the norm.
While pondering whether or not to go to Nairobi, another very multilingual city, I came across a prickly quote by D. P. Pattanayak, an Indian linguist and a champion
of India’s multilingual society (some 428 languages are spoken there), about how multilingualism was always explored from the perspective that a viable society could maintain only a finite number of languages and finite amount of cultural diversity. He proposed a question that turned the assumption over: “Given ethnic and linguistic diversity,” he asked, “what does the viable political order
look like?”
If India was the place to catch a glimpse of a more expansive way to live with many languages, that’s where I wanted to go. I decided to go south to Hyderabad, a former Muslim stronghold with a large Urdu-speaking population, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, where Telugu was spoken. Which language would I learn a bit of before going? I had a little Hindi in my head from shadowing with
Alexander,
garam garam hai
. But Hindi isn’t a good choice in south India, where the Dravidian languages are proudly spoken and Hindi has in the past been openly resisted.
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South India has four main Dravidian languages, two of which, Kannada and Telugu, were spoken in two of the Indian states I was going to visit. Don’t worry about it, my friend said. Everybody speaks English. Which wasn’t exactly
true. But there was a lot of English, which benefited me tremendously.
On that first morning in Secunderabad, once I finished sketching my book project for my hosts, Sri told me that I had to meet his cousin’s brother, a former ambassador of India, who speaks lots of languages, including non-Indian ones such as Chinese. Soon he was on his cell phone, setting up our visit in another city. I was
amazed. In a family where many languages are spoken; in a city where, depending on where you are, the signs are printed in Urdu and English, or Hindi and English, or Hindi and Telugu; in a country with uncountable hundreds of millions of people speaking two, three, or more languages, the polyglot was still powerful—it wasn’t just in my own monoglot country. Over and over I would present the case
of Mezzofanti, and people would shake their heads.
Incredible
.
One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where I’ve lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak in English or Spanish based on how someone looks is risky. If you try English and they don’t speak it, you can switch to Spanish if you know it. But if you start with Spanish, you
might offend:
You don’t think I speak English?
This can be the case if you’re Anglo, even if you speak Spanish very well and had just heard the other person speaking Spanish. When I described such a scenario to Indians, they couldn’t relate—to them, choosing the wrong language wasn’t embarrassing or politically charged. Or so they said.
“Doesn’t anyone get offended?” I asked a doctor whom Sri
had brought us to meet.
“No, why should we be offended?” She seemed baffled by the question.
Sri, who had heard me ask this question several times, cut in, a little exasperated. “No, you just say, I’m sorry, I cannot speak your language, please speak in English.”
One day we took a bus tour of Hyderabad’s popular sites: a white marble temple to Vishnu, a gaudy, fluorescent-lit museum filled
with the vast collections of a rich official, a palace of a Muslim ruler, and the zoo. Aside from one other foreign couple on the bus, everyone was
Indian. As we drove from place to place, the tour guide, a young man, hung on to the luggage racks as the bus jolted, rattling off descriptions and instructions in English. I was intrigued that by the end of the day he’d added Hindi to his narrations.
When the tour ended at a pearl jewelry store (Hyderabad is famous for its pearl trade), I pulled him aside to ask why he had switched.
He gestured to the women, older, dressed in saris, who were looking at pearl necklaces at a counter. He knew from the start of the tour that they’d want Hindi at some point.
“How did you know?” I asked him.
Based on how someone walks, from their clothes, and
from their appearance, he can tell what their mother tongue is. He himself also spoke Kannada, Telugu, and some Marathi. Others told me they judged (or guessed) based on skin color: people from the south tend to be darker than those from the north. (These are problematic stereotypes, though; it may well be that talking about skin color is code for other attitudes.) You might also choose a language
if you can hear the influence of their mother tongue in their Hindi. If one person can hear Kannada in another’s Hindi, they say, Let’s speak in Kannada. As their mother tongue, it’s what people want to speak anyway. In this vast country riven with differences, you grasp any connection you can.
One afternoon Kala and Sri took us to a Hyderabad fairground where textile merchants had set up booths:
Kashmiris with wool shawls, Rajasthanis displaying skirts sewn with tiny mirrors, fine chikan embroidery from Lucknow. Throngs of women (about half of them covered by black chadors, the other half dressed in vivid
salwar kameez
and scarves) circulated, checking out the cotton prints, silk saris, and lustrous brocades. We stopped in one booth so my wife could look at a blouse, where the clerk,
a young man, let slip to Sri that he’s from Bangalore. Sri perked up, then spoke Kannada. After some back-and-forth, the salesman said to us in English, “Since you can speak Kannada, I’ll give you a discount.” Everyone laughed: a safe harbor.
“See how that works?” Sri said to me as we walked away. “Language builds closeness. We started speaking Kannada, and we felt some closeness.”
In the days
that followed, we met many members of this family, each of whom spoke multiple languages—even the four-year-old grand-niece knew Hindi, English, and Telugu. Some languages were reserved for certain settings and people, and new languages seemed to follow jobs, not the other way around. The four-year-old’s mother, in her early thirties, said she speaks Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Punjabi,
Bengali, and English.
How well?
One presumes she could use them as she needed them. I was tempted to say that it’s hardly an environment where saying you have more languages means higher status, as it might in the West. Here, too, mentioning foreign languages is a power play; so is including Sanskrit as a language you speak, because
Sanskrit is no longer a spoken language
. Even her recital of
a list of languages was an expression of identity of class and caste. The four-year-old’s uncle, Ramu, also in his thirties, is a salesman for a company that builds textile looms—he grew up with Tamil at home and in elementary school, lived for a while in Bombay, where he learned Marathi, and knows Hindi, English, and Sanskrit. In college he studied German and later picked up Japanese to communicate
with visiting Japanese engineers. Fortunately, his teacher was a native Japanese speaker who also knew Hindi, a convenience since he not only taught in Hindi but could highlight its grammatical similarities with Japanese.