In south India the answer lies in social dynamics that are clearly organized along cognitive lines. One way that Indian brains are able to manage so many languages, according to the University of Chicago linguist and Tamil scholar E. Annamalai, is the Sprachbund. That overlap between languages is a result of generations of people trying to reduce the cognitive load of having to learn and remember so many of them. Another way to put it is that the Sprachbund is a cultural adaptation to two fixed constraints: a set of spoken entities whose boundaries will never blur, for cultural and political reasons, and the limits of the human brain. Something had to give. What gave was linguistic complexity itself.
Annamalai suggested to me that the adaptation included a “mono-grammar” that underlay all of the languages. While they sound different and use different vocabularies, he said, the grammars are nearly the same. Thus, to learn a new Dravidian language, you substitute new words into templates that some languages share. To use a radio metaphor, it’s like picking up the same broadcast at a different frequency. In that sense, the brain isn’t a container, it’s a receiver device that allows you to “pick up” the language.
The other way that Indians handle linguistic diversity, Annamalai contended, is by judging linguistic ability by what people can get done in a language, not by the institutional criteria that represent the “all or nothing” view of what it means to know a language. An Indian multilingual’s proficiencies might be low by the standards that a school or company might devise. But if judged (and self-judged) by what they could get done and how others perceived them, they might do just fine. Such speech is often dismissed. It’s “kitchen Hindi.” It’s “bazaar Telugu.” But this is comparing monolingual apples to multilingual oranges. In fact, “bilinguals know their languages to the level that they need them,” François Grosjean, a prominent researcher on bilingualism, has written.
I don’t mean to diminish the cultural richness of these societies or individual lives. But when you know these linguistic realities, it helps put claims about multilinguals into perspective, something that monolinguals wouldn’t otherwise have. If it dampens the enthusiasm for counting languages, perhaps it will also sharpen the search for some other measure of a person’s total linguistic competence. I don’t intend to make the people I met or the situations I saw or read about representative of all multilingual communities; in other places, the dynamics of languages will certainly be different. I went to India to learn something about hyperpolyglots. And I did.
One afternoon in the library at the Central Institute for Indian Languages, in the middle of reading various Indian scholars’ work on multilingualism, I jotted in my notebook that “the hyperpolyglot is the plurilingual individual in the West—the presence of language fluidity in the West.” There’s a truth to this, though I can’t shake the notion that they’re really doing something different from the Indian multilinguals whose lives I glimpsed.
One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brainpower.
Another difference is how learning these languages ties a person to his or her community. For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society. There’s no motive, no separable “will to plasticity” that’s distinct from what it means to be part of that society. Being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot’s pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community.
Taking my lead from Dick Hudson, I began my project by identifying hyperpolyglots as people who knew more languages than they needed to merely “belong” or get along in their local communities. I would go further, however. Hyperpolyglots are people who have the multicompetence to belong to a real or imagined global community. In order to learn more languages, they borrow tricks and adaptations to lighten their cognitive load from people in multilingual settings: they keep their languages at different levels of proficiency; they read and write only in some of them; they develop receptive knowledge in some languages and tend to know other languages that share vocabulary and grammatical regularities. Sometimes they count languages that they long ago studied but no longer (or rarely) used.
When I describe hyperpolyglots, some people wrinkle their noses. They have the sense that hyperpolyglots are doing something deviant. They’re not communicating, someone said. That’s what language is for, right? As much as they’re admired, they’re seen as socially isolated, devoid of their own culture. But the hyperpolyglots I met are no more shy or more reclusive than any other gifted, eccentric person—or any shy person, for that matter. And it’s not true that they don’t communicate. In fact, they do.
In one way, that’s all hyperpolyglots do, passing meaning back and forth like someone volleying balls across a tennis net. Recall that Mezzofanti knew a sequence of conversational starters in at least one language, Algonquin, and probably others as well. Or that Christopher has difficulty with word orders that differ from that of English. Or the cautionary tale of Ziad Fazah, who couldn’t take questions in languages he said he knew because he wasn’t expecting those questions or those languages. Even for Ivan Arguelles reading his Tamil in the supermarket checkout line, communication is a foregone conclusion. It’s like living in a script, an interaction between speakers that can only unfold seamlessly in the way it had already been composed.
Language, however, encompasses more than the communicating we sometimes do with it. If language had evolved solely for communication, we’d rarely misunderstand each other. Instead, we have a system in which words mean more than one thing, in which one can devise many sentences to capture the same idea, in which one moment of silence means more than a thousand pictures. No animal species could survive this intensity of ambiguity. Moreover, people don’t appreciate how little of our meaning is in our words, even as we decipher hand gestures, facial movements, body postures automatically every day. What we mean is implied by us and then inferred by our listeners. Meaning is outside the words, beyond them. But not so for the people I met.
Also, if you’re a hyperpolyglot, you live outside a language’s evolution. Languages change because the new people learning them (mainly children) modify them to suit themselves. A hyperpolyglot receives the future of any language he knows. He doesn’t actively make it—not in the same way that a four-year-old Indian living in Hyderabad and learning Hindi will. Being a hyperpolyglot likely also means that you’re fine with this. You reserve joking and verbal intimacies for only a few languages; you don’t intend to be able to enjoy them in all of your tongues. And if you’re outside the communities that shape a particular language, then so be it, because that’s the point: to be a professional outsider. You don’t appear on any map.
For people like this, “nativity” is simply the wrong standard to use to make sense of what they’re trying to do. They’re massively non-native. In one of my surveys, people said they focused on being intelligible and clear (if they were speaking). Like the counting of languages, “native-likeness” as shorthand for measuring language acquisition was relevant in a world in which people didn’t cross what were then distinct boundaries between speech communities. That’s not the world we live in now. That’s probably not the world we’ve been living in, either.
What will replace nativeness as a goal of proficiency? I suggest we need something brain-based. Something to weigh someone’s competences in all their languages, as unequal yet as dynamic as this group of things would be.
I began my search for hyperpolyglots with the sense that no matter what I found, the truth about language geniuses might help temper some of the contemporary anxiety over learning languages. Indeed, I confirmed that we mortals regard such people with a mix of envy, fear, and fascination. We hunger to know what the linguistic future holds—what’s the best preparation to give our children?
I learned a lot about myself, too: that I grieve for the languages I might have learned when my brain was more malleable and that my fascination with unsolved linguistic mysteries might outstrip my ability to deal with them.
Eventually I met a number of hyperpolyglots—perhaps more than anyone has ever met before—and researched others. From what I now knew about the beatific Mezzofanti, the crabby Krebs, the feisty Lomb, the obsessed Alexander, the excitable Helen, the shy Hale, and all the others, I built a picture of what qualities combined to make a polyglot. In accumulating languages, they followed their own interests and needs—refusing to bend either to an evolutionary logic or to social convention. Their attitude—and their success—made them models of the will to plasticity that permeates our era.
It’s still not clear what neurological story to tell about them. The powerful Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis suggests that a certain fetal environment could produce a brain that’s linguistically superior and that verbal gifts will accompany visuospatial deficits, along with other traits. People I’d met fit into this. Any real results would require a larger study.
I’d also seen proof that Emil Krebs had an unusual brain. This raised more questions, however. Had his brain been remarkable even before his encounter with French? Was it at all like other hyperpolyglot brains? A brain-imaging study of the population to confirm differences in the structure and functioning of their brains awaits a pioneer—at this writing, the project with Zilles and Amunts has yet to find its feet. Franco Pasti’s taunt echoed in my head. I might be a positivist—but I’m not a determinist.
How to explain why a hyperpolyglot brain might not produce a hyperpolyglot? This led to the next question: Do people with exceptionally powerful memories, especially for verbal material, and a fascination with language amount to something more than random single cases? Is there a more widespread phenomenon worth investigating? If so, what is it?
One day as I was writing this book, I reread Loraine Obler’s introduction to The Exceptional Brain. She suggests that talent can’t simply be a product of genes, since the activities in which a person could be “talented” would be culture-determined. A proficiency for programming computers wouldn’t have been recognized before computers. Surely, I thought, geek tendencies existed before computers. The skills would have been lying dormant in humans all along, waiting for cultural evolution to give them a stage on which to bloom. Who knows how many such hopeful talents the human species contains?
Language superlearning seemed to me like just such a talent, something given a purpose in a globalizing world, where language materials were widely available, travel was cheap, access to telecommunications was easy, and the borders of nations were melting away.
The history of culture is, in a sense, the process of uncovering certain talents while burying others—taking away the contexts that give certain abilities value. What if there were a neural tribe—a group of individuals who possess neural hardware that’s exceptionally suited for a particular activity, who have a sense of mission about undertaking the activity, and who cultivate a personal identity as someone who does that activity? Their mental ability would predate our civilization and stand outside it, though it would manifest itself according to the social and cultural makeup of the time.
As I read, it dawned on me. Hyperpolyglots don’t belong to a country; they work outside of institutions—beyond even their own communities. Hyperpolyglots are a neural tribe.
Chapter 16
If you have ever taken an aptitude test—to see if you should be a doctor or a teacher or a pipefitter—then you’ve encountered the basis for the concept of a neural tribe. You also encounter it in psychology’s long history of trying to map mental difference: IQ tests, “multiple intelligences,” cognitive styles. Not only are these strengths and weaknesses varied across the human population but human neurological development takes more than one path.
You’ve also encountered the concept of a neural tribe if you’ve heard of neurodiversity, a term coined by Judy Singer, an Australian disability activist, and first used in print by Harvey Flume, an American writer. Early on, it referred mainly to people living with autism spectrum disorders. Later it became a rallying cry for groups of people living with autism spectrum disorders who are building identities and even community around neuroatypicality. As a concept, the scope of “neurodiversity” has expanded. In a 2010 book, Neurodiversity, Thomas Armstrong describes people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, mood disorders, intellectual disabilities, and schizophrenia as “neurodiverse.” Armstrong also stresses the cultural frame used to define these as disabilities or gifts. Humans with typical neurologies would flourish in nearly any culture or time; the atypical ones require specific contexts, otherwise they’re marginalized or exploited. These days, the world is ripe for polyglottery.
Now surfacing, the hyperpolyglot tribe has long been lost to view—though hints of its existence pop out from time to time. Madeline Ehrman, a research scientist now retired from the Foreign Service Institute’s School of Language Studies, observed accomplished language learners who scored a level 4 (out of 5 possible) on FSI proficiency tests in reading, speaking, or both. There are relatively few level 4s—it’s difficult to score so high (only 1 percent of people who have taken the test have ever scored as high as natives)—and Ehrman found similarities among them. They tend to be meaning-oriented and pattern-seeking, and the majority of them were introverted intuitive thinkers. Using the labels of the Myers-Briggs personality type test, most of these were INTJs (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging). This means they’re highly analytical people, introverted and intuitive, logical and precise, and prone to thinking in terms of systems.
Ehrman also found an advantage for what she and a colleague have called “synoptic” learners, who acquire information unconsciously and “trust their guts.” A pure synoptic learner can quickly reach an intermediate level because their intuitions promote flexibility and discovery. On the downside, their skills tend to plateau. They might eventually be outperformed by people who take conscious control of their learning, a group she labeled “ectenics.”
Most frequent among adult learners with very high levels of language proficiency were those whom Ehrman calls “synoptic sharpeners.” They blend the best of the synoptic—flexibility and openness—with an attention style, known as sharpening, where close attention is paid to minute differences among sounds, words, and meaning. It’s not enough for them to call something “green”; the sharpener is precise and must identify it as “dusty olive.” They notice (which is a key skill that both Erik Gunnemark and Lomb Kató recommended). Synoptic sharpeners benefit from strategies that let them encounter language as it’s really used and, at the same time, notice linguistic details in those realms.
Whether you call these attributes “cognitive style” or “personality,” there are elements of each that come with us when we’re born, and that we might pass to our descendants.
My survey provided a thumbnail view of this neural tribe. Most hyperpolyglots will claim that learning languages is easier for them than for others. They’ll also say that this is because they possess an innate talent. They don’t have high IQs; they aren’t savants. If they seem reclusive, it’s not because they’re social cripples—I found some of them to be the most talkative shy people I’d ever met. Some hyperpolyglots are women, but far more are men, even though women tend to score higher on tests of verbal abilities than men. On my survey, of those who claimed more than six languages and said that learning languages was easier for them, 75 percent were men. It’s worth noting that the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis doesn’t predict that 100 percent will be men, since the male hormones that affect brain development are present in biological females as well.
Some only read their languages; others aim to develop oral skills. Each hyperpolyglot has a variety of uses for his or her languages. Though the great majority seem to be autodidacts, others are quite happy to learn with teachers and fellow students; their methods ra
nge widely. (See the Appendix for a list of methods from people who reported eleven languages or more.) Their lifetime repertoire of languages can be quite large, though the upper limit of fluently spoken, simultaneously accessible languages ranges from five to nine. More numerous latent languages can be “warmed up” or “reactivated.” As I’ve described, having a dynamic repertoire that consists of both “active” and “surge” languages is a near-universal feature of the tribe.
They are also rare, even in highly motivated populations of professional language learners. Edgar Donovan, a US Air Force officer and a Defense Language Institute graduate in Persian-Farsi who has studied several other languages, sent me his scores from official tests of his listening and reading proficiencies in fifteen languages. At DLI, these proficiencies are measured by the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT), which ranks language abilities on a scale of 0 to 5. (Getting the highest rating, 5, means that you are “functionally equivalent” to the well-educated native reader or listener.)
Given that DLI is a high-pressure school attended by ambitious people, you’d expect that many of the graduates would have multiple languages. Yet only 402 people out of the thousands who have attended have ever scored 2 or above in both listening and reading in at least three languages. And while only fifty-three people had four high-proficiency languages, Donovan was one of only twenty people who had at least five high-proficiency languages. Only twenty out of thousands. (True, there might have been others who hadn’t bothered to be tested, but given that more proven abilities could mean higher salaries or better postings, the number of people who didn’t bother is probably quite small.)
The online survey I designed captured information about two overlapping groups: those who reported that they knew six or more languages, and those who said that learning a foreign language was easier for them than it was for others. There are two groups because a talent for learning isn’t always realized, and because not everyone with many languages found learning them easier. A more accurate picture emerges if potential is separated from actual achievements.
Babel No More Page 23