Even though Krebs’s brain had a very different cell structure from normal brains, it wasn’t clear whether those differences might have existed before he encountered his first foreign language. I asked our German hosts about this. “How long would it take for Krebs’s brain to develop like that? Could it happen in a year? Or is that the lifetime of change?”
“That’s an interesting question,” Loraine said. “Or was he born like that?”
Zilles said he didn’t know. Such changes can come from training, he said. They can also emerge quickly—cellular-level changes in the brains of pianists, for instance, can occur in a matter of weeks. And intensive use gives musicians different brains from nonmusicians’ brains. Studies of rats have shown that training increases the number of synapses and glial cells and makes the capillaries supplying oxygen denser. Jugglers and taxi drivers have markedly different brains from nonjuggling, non-taxi-drivers. Persistent overuse could be a simple reason for the cells’ peculiar arrangement as well as his brain’s remarkable symmetries.
“When you look at a histological section, you see the cell bodies that are stained, and in the cell bodies there is unstained tissue,” he said. “But there is something there, in those unstained areas. There are dendrites. There are synapses, and the glial cells, and the blood vessels. But most of this volume is for dendrites, synapses. For contacts. These contacts are very fast-moving structures, so such a synapse can change within hours. When you do training, then you will get an effect on the synapses, and so the space between the cell bodies changes its size.”
Amunts disagreed with her colleague. To her, Krebs’s cytoarchitecture could have caused or enabled his linguistic predisposition, instead of resulting from it. His parents were neither educated nor rich; other people paid for his schooling. If the story of Krebs and the French newspaper was to be believed, he brought a distinct cognitive foundation to learning foreign languages very early on.
“I’m convinced that there’s something in his genes,” she said. “You cannot say this is only the environment. That is rather simplistic.”
Here the story of Krebs’s abilities might have stalled in another endless round of arguments about the primacy of nature or nurture. In the popular mind, only one of these can drive outcomes, not both. Meanwhile, scientists are trying to describe how biological resources and experiences in the environment interact, on what schedule, and with what impact. It turns out that genetic mechanisms not only make you; they also determine the range by which you can be made by your environment.
One such genetic trait that Krebs might have possessed was the way his brain regulated its plasticity—how sculptable and moldable his brain was in response to things in his environment. Overall, his tendency toward more or less malleability would be driven by genetic factors. No matter how someone without that plasticity practices, they won’t be able to speed it up or make it stick more. It’s widely known that babies and other young animals have an “exuberant plasticity” that allows them to learn about their world very quickly. Yet neuroscientists now also think that the brain’s essence—at any age—is to be changeable. What happens in adulthood is that the plasticity has been “braked” for one very good reason: in order to survive and succeed, adults have to have a certain amount of reliable neural structure that is usable over months and years. One of the ways that Krebs’s brain might have been unusual was that it preserved more of its childhood plasticity.
Even among normal learners, there’s a lot of variation between individuals when the malleability of childhood hardens. Bilingual kids also enjoy an advantage in remaining open to new language input. And, in some rare cases, language learners appear to enjoy a plasticity past the point where it’s shut off for others. Unfortunately, because linguists have been most fascinated with the acquisition of native-like skills, more is known about people who are able to learn one or two more languages very deeply rather than about those who can acquire a good working knowledge in a larger set. Again, it was the bias for the “all or nothing” view over the “something and something” view of language abilities.
Young humans use their exuberant plasticity for learning many things; one of the most important is for language. The notion of a critical period for language learning was first formulated in the 1960s by linguist Eric Lenneberg. “Automatic acquisition from mere exposure to a given language seems to disappear after [puberty], and foreign languages have to be taught and learned through a conscious and labored effort,” Lenneberg wrote. The exact nature of this critical period for language has long been debated, even though its biological mechanism isn’t known. One limit is puberty, which means hormones are likely involved. But is puberty the end of plasticity or simply the beginning of the end? No one knows for sure.
Ever since Lenneberg, researchers in second-language acquisition have taken the adult’s decline in plasticity—the closing of the critical period window—to refer almost exclusively to the impossibility of learning a language like a native speaker. Even though the brain has no native languages, only focused activity in certain neural circuits, linguists have looked only at how “linguistic insiders” are produced. Some researchers have even fiercely defended the claim that no one who begins learning a language outside the critical period will ever have native-like abilities. In one recent study of Swedish learners, none of the adult learners passed a nativeness test, and only 3 of the 107 child learners did. If a child learning Swedish can’t become a native speaker, then who can?
Opponents of the critical period hypothesis have taken on these claims directly—by trying to find adults who have, in fact, achieved nativeness in languages they didn’t grow up with. Some have figured that only 5 percent of adult learners can do this. Some put the number even lower, at fewer than 1 percent. Even so, these opponents are bound by “nativeness” as the sole criterion of success at learning a language—they’ve let the proponents of the hypothesis set the terms by which the debate is waged.
In one recent dissertation, forty-three non-native speakers of Dutch, a language they’d started learning after the age of twelve, were asked to do some tasks with a type of sentence that’s hard for people to learn.* If you knew languages close to Dutch, as some participants did, you could borrow and apply what you know. If your native language was one like Turkish, you’d have nothing to fall back on. Your language lacks this sentence structure completely. Of the forty-three, nineteen were able to produce this kind of sentence like native speakers did. Most were women; most were also more likely to speak German and French than Turkish, and had spoken Dutch for a long time. Interestingly, all had either studied a third language as well, or had worked as teachers, translators, or some other language-related job. This was significant, because the answer didn’t lie in their fondness for languages—every single one of the forty-three subjects had said that they liked to learn languages.
In another project, an exhaustive battery of proficiency tests was given to nine non-native English speakers who’d been mentioned or referred to the researcher as having excellent English. All nine had learned English after age sixteen and had lived in the United States for at least five years. Only three of them performed like native English speakers on tests of grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary size, politeness, and storytelling. All three were women. They were all from Eastern Europe, had studied English for at least five years before coming to the United States, and lived with native English speakers (two of the three were married). They also used their first languages infrequently.
For these cases, what predicted good English was using a lot of English. No other biological factor—gender or age of arrival—predicted good English or vocabulary size. You just had to live longer in the States, preferably with a native speaker. On the surface, it appeared to be a victory for the power of practice and immersive experience to trigger changes in the brain. But other individuals might share those same biographical facts and still not speak English well enough to be referred for a study. The studies didn’t provide
a cognitive profile of the high performers, either. They couldn’t speak to the cognitive skills that those individuals brought to their tasks, nor could they account for how one person’s brain might be more plastic than another. Could a measurement of brain plasticity be a better way to predict language learning outcomes?
One day, after my trip to Germany, I was at home in the apartment, dealing with a clogged bathroom sink. The landlord came over with his son-in-law to fix it. In the course of chatting, the landlord asked what I was working on, and I told him, a book about people who speak a lot of languages. Really? my landlord said. He speaks a lot of languages, he said, pointing to his son-in-law, who was half sticking out of the cabinet. He’s from Iran, and he’s lived all over. He speaks six or seven languages. He’s a genius.
Is that true? I asked the son-in-law.
Yeah, it’s true, he said, from under the sink.
How many languages can someone learn? So far, I’d pursued an answer among massive accumulators and high-intensity learners, many of whom came from monolingual communities. I knew little about places where normal people, inheritors of a normal biological endowment, regularly learn to speak many languages. I knew I had to venture out for a closer look to see what else I could learn about the brains of Babel.
Part 4
ELABORATION:
The Brains of Babel
Chapter 15
Over the palm trees, the sun was barely squinting, and already the traffic lashed the dusty intersection in front of the Hotel Diamond Point. Streams of small trucks; battered motorcycles; shiny compact cars; yellow, three-wheeled auto-rickshaws; scooters; bicycles; pedestrians; and the occasional oxcart converged from five directions onto the same point, creating a chaotic whirlpool in the middle of the intersection. No signs channeled the crush, no lights controlled it; there were no lanes, hardly even curbs.
I was watching this on the street in Secunderabad, a south Indian city whose entire population seemed to be trying to pass in front of the hotel in one unstoppable throng, at that very moment. When you’re in a vehicle, the traffic feels crushing; then you realize that you’re not being crushed; then that you’re making slow progress toward your goal. After a couple days of crossing Secunderabad and neighboring Hyderabad (with a population of four million) on roads like this, you realize that the visible chaos has predictable patterns. Maybe that’s what kept drivers so eerily calm as they headed into the whirlpool—keep your speed, make no sudden movements, and you might stay safe. Maybe the policeman, a lone man in a white hat, shaped these flows. No, I realized, he’s just a witness to the gridlock’s wonder. On a giant poster high on a building, the face of a beatific swami gazed upon the waves of disorder.
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?”
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