Authors: Michael Erard
“I don’t know how to call these people,” she admitted. “I suppose you call them multilinguals, but in another sense from people who have the full range of competencies in the spoken and written language. You’ve got to qualify
what it means to speak a language.”
That knot of a question stayed with me.
What does it mean to speak a language?
In Ann Patchett’s novel
Bel Canto,
the multilingual interpreter, Gen, must ask for a doctor in the many languages spoken by the people
with whom he’s been kidnapped. Gen knows a bunch of words and how to pronounce them; he knows how the words are put together; he knows how to construct
sentences. These three areas—lexicon, morphology, and syntax—make up what linguists call the “code.” Maybe you could call knowing the code speaking the language. Yet Gen also judges how he puts the code to work. This is called “pragmatics.” He’s constantly weighing word choices, worrying that he’s said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Now, the tricky part about the subtleties of pragmatics
is that you have to learn them firsthand. Say you’re in Japan, leaving a country inn after a meal, and the owner, a woman, says to you, “
Arigato gozaimashita”—
“Thank you (for what you did eating in my restaurant).” How do you respond? Though you know
Doiteshimashite—
“You’re welcome”—this would be wholly inappropriate. Properly and politely, you might bow. You may also say, “
Domo,
” or “Thanks,”
as in “Thank
you
very much.” Interestingly, to act most like a linguistic insider, you would be right to say nothing at all.
Maybe the right question was not about
speaking
a language, it was about
knowing
a language—which had several definitions, Kramsch acknowledged. By her definition, knowing a language means that someone has to have the code and its pragmatics, and be able to make literate
use of the code. They also have to possess a strongly felt, deeply held combination of language, identity, and culture that makes up the intangible but visceral quality called an “attachment” to language. Only those people who feel that attachment powerfully enough to defend it can “know” a language.
According to Kramsch, to know a language means that you know the culture of its native speakers.
You carry the language’s cultural baggage—which would mean, among other things, that you know the significance of what you choose to say in this or that language. “If you talk to Latinos in the United States, that’s why their attachment to the language is more than just about their ability to use different labels for the same object,” she said. “It’s an attachment to an emotional kind of world
of experience that is indissociable from the use of the language in particular contexts.”
“So those people who simply master the linguistic system, should they be limited from saying that they speak that language?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “They speak the language, but they have no cultural attachment to it.”
“Does that disqualify them from being able to claim that they’re multilingual?”
“One has to bear in mind,” she said, “that there are these kinds of people, who don’t associate any particular cultural baggage with any of the languages that they speak. One can play terrific scales on the piano and have a dazzling mastery of scales and notes, but that doesn’t mean to say that you understand Mozart or that you are a gifted musician. It’s one thing to master the code. It’s another
thing to understand what people mean, or why speakers of that code don’t use it interchangeably.”
“What’s the most languages you’ve felt someone personally engaged with?” I asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Testimonies of multilinguals show that they resonate personally and culturally in a different manner with maybe three or four languages. Five is stretching it already, and that includes
your own, the one you grew up with.” Most of these people grew up with three languages and then added a fourth, she added. They were personally engaged with the culture and what she called “the frame of mind of the speakers of the language.”
“One of my sons,” she said, “he grew up in three languages and added a fourth, but even though he learned languages on the side, I can’t say [of] his sixth
or seventh languages that he resonated with them. . . . In my case, I resonate culturally to three. Even though I had Russian, Greek, Latin, et cetera. But . . . these are butterflies,” she said, laughing, “that I add to my collection.”
Of course, one can legitimately set the bar for knowing a language in any number of places, and the limits that one employs will reflect one’s experiences and
investments. By her definition, six-year-olds who can’t yet read can’t be said to know even their native language. The same is true for people who, no matter how proficient, haven’t grown up acquiring the cultural baggage of a language. Later, I wondered why anyone would want to tackle learning a language if one were always to be held to a native speaker’s knowledge as the target to shoot for.
The point she made in closing was a valuable one. “You know, the languages we speak are so much a part of the experiential fabric of our lives, so asking how many languages you know is only asking half the question,” she said. “You should also ask,
In how many languages do you live?
Of course, the more languages you have in your life, the more enriched your experiences are, but keeping them all
up requires more travel and contact than most people can do. So I would say that people could do, at the utmost, four or five languages.”
I also asked Robert DeKeyser, an expert in language acquisition at the University of Maryland, what he thought about the stories of Mezzofanti.
“If you have a good memory and you’re motivated, then learning enough vocabulary in a dozen languages is not a feat
at all. The reason more people don’t do so is that very few people are motivated to do so,” DeKeyser said.
“What is much harder,” he said, “and what you
do
need a special aptitude for, is that you need to be fluent, and not only fast and fluent, but accurate in a wide variety of languages. There, you’re not just talking about vocabulary, you’re talking about grammar. And you’re not just using
grammar, but doing it very quickly, like native speakers do, using a number of rules at an amazingly high rate of speed. So you need a lot of practice.
“In turn,” he continued, “that implies two other things: first, a much larger amount of time than is needed for memorizing vocabulary, and also what I would call a capacity for monitoring in your speech what you know about grammar. So, even if
you know all the basic grammar, it still takes a lot of effort to use it at normal speed in spoken language. I think that if you do find someone who is exceptionally good at speaking a fairly high number of languages quite fluently and accurately, what you’re going to find is really typical of them is that they are so good at doing this monitoring.
“It’s not like we only have eighteen compartments
for language in the brain and then we’re done,” DeKeyser said. “But in order to learn so many languages so well, and to keep them up after learning them, you
need an amount of time that nobody has, even if you spent all your time speaking and practicing languages.
“So when we hear these stories about cardinals one hundred or two hundred years ago, I’m very, very, very, very skeptical,” he said,
“because most people who are not linguists don’t even realize what it really means to learn a language. They also don’t realize that—even if you can speak a language fairly fluently—how incredibly far away you are from native proficiency by any real standards.”
He’d brought up native proficiency as a standard of comparison without any prompting from me. Was that the best criterion to use for
someone like Mezzofanti?
DeKeyser was born and raised in Belgium, a country that’s officially multilingual yet so politically fractious, it’s often held up as a case study for why political systems can’t function smoothly with more than one official language. Dutch is spoken in the north; French in the southwest; German in a small southeastern area; and everyone studies English. (DeKeyser speaks
all four.) Added to the stew is the polyglot bureaucracy of the European Commission, based in Brussels, a city where you’re most likely to hear French, though Dutch is an official language, too.
Belgians’ multilingualism stems from economics—the country depends on imports and exports—and from the tiny size of the Dutch-speaking population, about 22 million worldwide. Taking on a number of languages
is a social expectation, something that children are taught to believe in—and not, I was interested to find, something they magically imbibe in the Belgian tap water. Taking language courses is a recreational pastime that’s subsidized by the government. The happy outward face that Belgians put on their many languages masks the economic tensions between regions of the country. I once heard someone
call Belgium a “nice laboratory for multilingualism.” Someone else called it “a low-grade linguistic Serbia.” That sounded more realistic.
Before we parted, DeKeyser shared a dim memory from the late 1980s, in which a Belgian bank, now defunct, had sponsored a contest to find the most multilingual Belgian. A sort of language game, with rules. Hundreds of people had applied. Contestants were tested
in brief conversations with native speakers from universities and embassies.
“Of course, a lot of people claimed a lot more languages, but they couldn’t do very much in these languages,” he said. “One of my colleagues was involved in testing one person in Hindi, and this person knew a lot about Hindi and could converse a bit. But could you say this person
knew
Hindi?”
He couldn’t remember the
bank or the name of the winner or how multilingual he or she proved to be. Of course, the number of languages would have to be very small. Maybe, DeKeyser said, only eight?
A real, living hyperpolyglot whose oral skills have been assessed by experts? Hmm, I thought. Now, that’s definitely someone I’d like to meet.
Chapter 3
S
een from the window of my penthouse bed-and-breakfast, the red roofs and orange walls of Bologna’s buildings glowed like embers. Down there, somewhere, was Mezzofanti’s secret, waiting to be unearthed. Each morning, I woke early to look at the sun pouring over the roofs, the cathedral, and the two tall, leaning towers, the Due Torri, rising from the spreading light. An elevator cage
rattled up the shaft to greet me and delivered me to the first floor. I walked through the cool porticos of the narrow, jumbled streets as single scooters buzzing down the cobblestones scuffed the morning quiet.
Along the way to the library that housed Mezzofanti’s archive, I’d stop at a bar for espresso and a pastry. My first morning, I could only ask for
un espresso,
point, and shrug. Does
anyone care how well a visiting foreign writer talks in the local tongue? By the end of the week, I was better at shrugging, was pointing less, and had mastered
Per favore, un espresso e un dolce
;
Come pagare
; and
Come si dice
. I had also learned the essential phrase
Non posso parlare italiano,
which will always be true.
Under a statue of Luigi Galvani, the eighteenth-century physician who discovered
how electricity moves muscles, I read the newspaper, in English, until the gates to the Archiginnasio public library opened. Built between 1562 and 1563, the Archiginnasio housed the university
until 1803; part of this large public facility became the municipal library in 1838, and now its courtyards and grand lecture halls offer a miniature history of Bologna. During World War II, Allied bombs
damaged most of it—though, luckily for me, the Mezzofanti papers stored there had been spirited to the hills. One day, I drifted into the anatomical theater, a large wood-paneled room lined with wooden statues of ancient scientists and doctors. Destroyed in the bombing, these statues rested high on the walls and had been reconstructed to look down, as they had during the Renaissance, on a central
marble dissection table. There, in the name of medical science, the bodies of executed criminals had been cut apart, sectioned, labeled, and compared. Never, though, the bodies of hyperpolyglots. Or their brains.
I’d painted a nice picture for myself of how my first day in the rare manuscript room would go. I’d come in and introduce myself with magical Italian fluency, then blow the dust off
a box lid and find—oh, confessions, boasts, poems, or perhaps the parchment on which a pact with Mephistopheles was signed in blood, promising a lifetime of unlimited linguistic capacity and an eternity in the Dark One’s company. Evidence of Mezzofanti’s prowess would be so irrefutable, the truth about the cardinal could now be revealed.
What did happen was more like this: I stumbled up the stairs,
following signs I could barely decipher.
Biblioteca
and
manoscritti,
easy enough. The woman at the guard desk stopped me with a stream of Italian before I could make the common signal for
I don’t speak your language
. I shrugged my shoulders—she kept talking. Then I tried the universal gesture for
I’d like to look at the manuscripts. Manuscritti,
I said.
Manoscritti
?
Sì
. She pointed down the hall.
I turned to walk. No, no, no, she said. Exasperated with my stupidity, she gestured to my laptop, then handed me a slip of paper to fill out:
nome, indirizzo, telefono
. Fine; I filled it out. The paper stamped, where to go now? She pointed. Down the hall.
The room that housed rare manuscripts was long and high-ceilinged with tall bookshelves behind glass doors. In the archival-quality silence,
librarian heads swiveled when I entered.
“Buongiorno,”
I said.
“Buongiorno,”
said one librarian, a middle-aged woman with a decidedly curdled attitude. I knew only the name of the librarian I’d emailed a few weeks before—me writing in English, her replying in Italian, me putting
her replies into online translation tools. Paola Foschi? I asked, pronouncing it
foshee.
The uptight librarian added
an expression of puzzlement. Ah, she said,
foskee,
then she asked me to wait.