With minutes to spare in Geneva, Switzerland, I found my overnight train to Italy. On the platform, I checked my ticket with the conductor, hauled my suitcase down the sleeper car’s narrow hallway into its tiny, tidy compartment, and unpacked a sandwich and a bottle of beer. I took out Moby-Dick and kicked off my shoes. After a hectic day of travel, I was looking forward to a quiet evening. I also needed to be rested so I could hit Bologna’s libraries and archives first thing in the morning.
A couple of minutes later, the conductor came by, a grandfatherly Italian with a thick black moustache and forbearing eyes, gesturing for my ticket. Aha. He shook his finger, said something in Italian, and pointed to the ticket’s date, by which I grasped: the ticket is for today’s date, but for a month later. Fortunately, the conductor can tell me where I can go, I thought. No, wait, I realized, he can’t speak English. And I don’t speak Italian. I can speak Spanish, I said. (At least enough to understand what needs to happen here, I thought to myself.) Oh, so can I, he said, and, switching to Spanish, he explained what he was going to do. The suitcase was unstowed; the sandwich, beer, and book packed up; and I was squeezed past two backpackers who were waiting for what turned out to be their compartment.
The train had started out, and now I needed a berth. Until he could secure me a permanent spot for the night, the conductor put me in a compartment with a man who spoke only Italian. In preparation for my trip, I’d been reading a new book about Mezzofanti that had been written in Italian—or, rather, I’d been placing Italian words into grammatical patterns from Spanish. Whenever I’d gotten stuck or wanted to check an intuition (or, let’s face it, a flat-out guess), I’d made liberal use of Google’s language tools. Now I found myself with someone to speak to, but my lips were welded shut. Ashamed that something more Spanishified than Italian would come out of my mouth (especially since it had been primed talking with the conductor), I let the welds hold, and the opportunity flashed by like the Swiss countryside.
I spent the night in a compartment with a youth from South Korea who spoke a bit of English and a Peruvian guy living in Geneva who spoke English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese. Not all equally well, he admitted, and he’d once known Italian, but as soon as he’d studied Portuguese as an adult, he lost his Italian completely. His English was far from impeccable—his accent thick and his sentences simple—but would I say he spoke English? We talked about educational philosophies for a while, all in English, and I didn’t choose easier words on his behalf. Sure, I’d say he spoke English.
And let me tell you, there’s nothing like a trip on a European train to make a white American fellow realize that English, his cradle and his throne, has also been his prison. Sitting with a guy who speaks five languages (four of which he wasn’t native to) was intimidating. I started to feel defensive: to be fair, if Americans lived near or traveled across as many borders as Europeans do, they might be multilingual, too. It’s all about context and need, and those together engender a cultural confidence about learning languages that’s hard to replicate. Once monolingualism is in the genome of a culture, it’s hard to breed out.
I told him I was going to Bologna to research a nineteenth-century cardinal, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who spoke a huge number of languages, seventy-two of them, or so it was said. I felt compelled to include that last caveat—I didn’t want him to think I accepted the claim uncritically. Had Mezzofanti actually been able to speak that many? I didn’t know for sure, though all the accounts of his life had confirmed a very high number.
“Seventy-two languages,” my new friend said. “That’s incredible.”
I know, I thought, it’s incredible, isn’t it? If there were no traces, or if the stories could be proved false, I would at least be able to feel the grim satisfaction of the devil’s advocate: to have dispelled a fraudulent reputation, to have discredited a miracle.
But if clues to his genius could be found, then this trip would count as a pilgrimage. As a kid, I had fantasized about learning many languages, too. To be able to talk and read in something other than English seemed proof that a gawky pubescent dreamer could shed his gawkiness and achieve his dreams of escaping to far-off places. But the dream sagged to the ground like a kite on a windless day. At the start of every summer vacation, my mother made me list what I wanted to accomplish by August. The top of the list: “Learn French.” (My family’s ethnically French.) And there it stayed, year after year; I never learned French. I never even began. Without anyone to help me, I didn’t know where to start. High school Spanish beckoned, but the dullness of the classes bleached my passion and the language along with it.
In college, an academic advisor noted Spanish on my transcript. “What about studying abroad in South America?” she asked. My reluctance was brief. Soon enough, I found myself sitting in a kitchen in Bogotá, Colombia, attempting small talk with Zoraida, my host mother. A desperate search for chitchat, not my strong suit even in English, had me squeaking “Me gusta tu perro” about the small white dog licking my hand.
“You already said that,” Zoraida remarked in Spanish.
Understanding that much was luck. Eventually I grew to say, read, and comprehend much more, surprising myself. Traveling made it easier to hang on to the language. I understood entire lectures delivered in the pure accent of the Colombian altiplano without registering that I was doing so. A girlfriend, an American, who had acquired French and Spanish during what appeared (to my dreamer’s eye) to be an exotic childhood, spurred me to get language experiences of my own. Which is why, after college, I lived in Taiwan teaching English, studying Mandarin Chinese, picking up a bit of Taiwanese (a bar trick that proved as useful in the classroom), and testing the folk wisdom that lovers make the best language teachers. Days went by when I spoke no English outside of the classroom. I wondered: If this keeps up, will I recognize myself?
At my best moments in these languages, I felt comfortable speaking and listening, and I always improved, though not unceasingly—the plateaus could be as long and unbroken as Kansas. Back in the States, with English full-time, my fluencies collapsed, perhaps because I hadn’t reached a high enough level, or because I didn’t do the right things to keep up my skills. Floating in the back of my mind was the thought that if I couldn’t gain a native’s fluency, pursuing these languages was inconsequential.
The truth is, I’m neither a language superhero nor a hyperpolyglot. I consider myself a monolingual with benefits: more than a monoglot, much less than a polyglot. Fantasies of restoring some bit of that fluency in Spanish and Chinese rise up now and then, but I might as well hope to grow feathers and fly. I loved using those languages, but finding opportunities to do so where I live takes effort. I can be lazy and haphazard. My forty-three-year-old memory is more sieve than steel trap. And I bear the emotional legacy of teachers and textbook writers who made me submit to pedagogical contraptions that made language learning cumbersome and absurd. One goal of adulthood is to avoid all the irrelevant and absurd things imposed on us in childhood, so the path clearly leads away from the language classroom. Life is Sisyphean enough as it is.
Yet, in speaking another language, I’ve also experienced some of the thrillingest thrills in my life, when the sunlight of sense shone on gobbledygook; when the smooth and effortless Spanish or Chinese conversations of my dream life happen when I’m awake. When I piece together a sentence in Hindi to the delight of my hosts. When I overhear Beijing merchants discuss the price of some merchandise in Mandarin, and then tell them, in Mandarin, that I know the true price after they’ve quoted me a higher one. When I glimpse, even for a split second, a different way to be, and begin to accrue more self—an uncanny me emerging from a strange syntax. These are feelings I love, and would love to have again. That much I share with the hyperpolyglots I describe in this book.
But I don’t know why the hard part of learning languages was so hard, or why the easy parts were easy. All I know is that I don’t want to speak seventy-two or even twelve languages. I real
ly just want more of the easy and less of the hard.
The next day, I arrived in Bologna. I wanted to find the truth, but if it eluded me, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Before embarking for Bologna, I had contacted a few experts for some perspective on what I hoped to find. One was a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, Claire Kramsch, who had published and written a lot about multilingualism, so I looked forward to her sympathetic insights. Yes, she told me, there are people who learn many languages. Then she paused. “Not only Europeans, I mean, but in Africa children grow up knowing, speaking, parts or elements of eight or nine different languages at the drop of a hat because they live in regions where villages have their own languages, and people intermarry and learn each other’s ways of speaking, and so forth.
“But I wouldn’t say that they speak different languages,” she added, in a charming British accent of her own. “They speak many different languages, but they don’t necessarily know how to read or write in them, which often don’t have a written form. And those languages are used in very specific contexts—you need to know the language of the tribe that you’re going to meet at the water pump, but you won’t necessarily know how to order meat from them at the market. So each language is restricted to a particular domain.
“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 th
e 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.
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