The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (67 page)

In contrast, multilingualism is widespread or routine in traditional small-scale non-state societies. The reasons are again simple. We have seen that traditional language communities are small (a few thousand speakers or less) and occupy small areas. Immediately neighboring communities often speak different languages. People regularly encounter and have to deal with speakers of other languages. To trade, to negotiate alliances and access to resources, and (for many traditional people) even to obtain a spouse and to communicate with that spouse requires being not merely bilingual but multilingual. Second and further languages are learned in childhood and in the home or socially, not through formal instruction. In my experience, fluency in five or more languages is the rule
among traditional New Guineans. I shall now supplement those New Guinea impressions of mine with brief accounts from two continents: Aboriginal Australia and tropical South America.

Aboriginal Australia was occupied by about 250 different language groups, all of them subsisting by hunting-gathering, with an average of about a thousand speakers per language. All reliable reports describe most traditional Aboriginals as being at least bilingual, and most as knowing many languages. One such study was carried out by anthropologist Peter Sutton in the Cape Keerweer area of the Cape York Peninsula, where the local population of 683 people was divided into 21 clans, each with a different form of speech and averaging 33 people per clan. Those speech forms are classified into five languages plus about seven dialects, so that the average number of speakers is about 53 per speech form, or 140 per language. Traditional Aborigines in the area spoke or understood at least five different languages or dialects. In part because speech communities are so tiny, and in part because of a preference for linguistic exogamy (marrying someone whose primary language is not one’s own), 60% of marriages are between partners speaking different languages, another 16% are between speakers of different dialects of the same language, and only 24% are within the same dialect. That is despite the fact that neighboring clans tend to be linguistically similar, so that mere propinquity would lead to marriages being made within the same dialect if it were not for that preference for seeking geographically and linguistically more remote partners.

Because many social groups at Cape Keerweer involve speakers of different languages, conversations are often multilingual. It is customary to begin a conversation in the language or dialect of the person whom you are addressing, or (if you are a visitor) in the language of the host camp. You may then switch back to your own language, while your partners reply in their own languages, or you may address each person in his/her own language, your choice of language thereby indicating whom you are addressing at the moment. You may also switch languages depending on the implicit message that you wish to convey: e.g., one choice of language means “You and I have no quarrel,” another means “You and I do have a quarrel but I wish to cool it,” still another means “I am a good and socially proper person,” and yet another means “I will insult you by talking to you
disrespectfully.” It is likely that such multilingualism was routine in our hunter-gatherer past, just as it still is today in traditional areas of New Guinea, and for the same underlying reasons: tiny speech communities, hence frequent linguistic exogamy, and daily encounters and conversations with speakers of other languages.

The other pair of studies, by Arthur Sorensen and Jean Jackson, is from the Vaupés River area on the border between Colombia and Brazil in the northwest Amazon Basin. About 10,000 Indians, speaking about 21 different languages of four different language families, are culturally similar in gaining their livelihood by farming, fishing, and hunting along rivers in tropical rainforests. Like Cape Keerweer Aborigines, Vaupés River Indians are linguistically exogamous but much more strictly so: in over a thousand marriages studied by Jackson, only one may possibly have been within a language group. While boys remain as adults in their parents’ longhouse in which they grew up, girls from other longhouses and language groups move to their husband’s longhouse at the time of marriage. A given longhouse contains women marrying in from several different language groups: three, in the case of a longhouse studied intensively by Sorensen. All children learn both their father’s and their mother’s languages already from infancy, then learn the languages of the other women of the longhouse. Hence everyone in the longhouse knows the four longhouse languages (that of the men, and those of the three language groups of the women), and most also learn some other languages from visitors.

Only after Vaupés River Indians have come to know a language well by hearing and passively acquiring vocabulary and pronunciation do they start speaking it. They carefully keep languages separate and work hard to pronounce each language correctly. They told Sorensen that it took them one or two years to learn a new language fluently. High value is placed on speaking correctly, and letting words from other languages creep into one’s conversation is considered shameful.

These anecdotes from small-scale societies on two continents and on New Guinea suggest that socially acquired multilingualism was routine in our past, and that the monolingualism or school-based multilingualism of modern state societies is a new phenomenon. But this generalization is only tentative and subject to limitations. Monolingualism may have characterized small-scale societies in some areas of low language diversity
or recent language expansions, as at high latitudes or among the Inuit east of Alaska. The generalization remains based on anecdotes and on expectations derived from traditionally small language communities. Systematic surveys employing some standard definition of multilingualism are needed to place this conclusion on a firmer foot.

Let’s now ask whether that traditional multilingualism or bilingualism brings net benefit, net harm, or neither to bilingual individuals compared with monolingual individuals. I’ll describe some fascinating and recently discovered practical advantages of bilingualism that may impress you more than the usual claim that learning a foreign language enriches your life. I’ll discuss here only the effects of bilingualism for individuals: I’ll defer to a later section the corresponding question about whether bilingualism is good or bad for a society as a whole.

Among modern industrial countries, bilingualism is a subject of debate especially in the United States, which has been incorporating a large fraction of non-English-speaking immigrants into its population for over 250 years. A frequently expressed view in the U.S. is that bilingualism is harmful, especially for children of immigrants, who are thereby hindered in negotiating the prevalently English-speaking culture of the U.S. and will be better off not learning their parents’ language. This view is widely held not only by native-born Americans but also by first-generation immigrant parents: e.g., by my grandparents and by my wife’s parents, who diligently avoided speaking together in Yiddish and Polish respectively in the presence of their children, in order to make sure that my parents and my wife would learn only English. Additional bases for this view on the part of native-born Americans include fear and suspicion of things foreign, including foreign languages; and a concern on the part of both native-born and immigrant parents that it may be confusing for children to be exposed simultaneously to two languages, and that their mastery of language would be faster if they were exposed to just one language. That reasoning is a legitimate concern: a child learning two languages must learn twice as many speech sounds, words, and grammatical structures as
a monolingual child; the bilingual child has only half as much time to devote to each language; and so the bilingual child (it is feared) may end up speaking two languages poorly, instead of speaking one language well.

In fact, studies carried out in the U.S., Ireland, and Wales until the 1960s did report that bilingual children were significantly disadvantaged linguistically compared to monolingual children, learned command of language more slowly, and ended up with smaller vocabularies in each language. But it was eventually realized that that interpretation was confounded by other variables correlated with bilingualism in those studies. In the U.S. more than in other countries, bilingualism is associated with poverty. When American bilingual children were compared with American monolingual English-speaking children, the latter tended to be from more affluent communities, to be attending better schools, and to have more educated and wealthy parents working at higher occupational levels and with larger vocabularies. Those correlates of bilingualism alone might have accounted for the lower language skills of the bilingual children.

More recent studies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe control for those other variables, by comparing bilingual and monolingual children attending the same school and matched for parental socio-economic status. It turns out that bilingual children and monolingual children matched in other respects pass milestones of language acquisition (e.g., age to say first word, first sentence, or to acquire a 50-word vocabulary) at the same age. Depending on the study, either bilingual and monolingual children end up as adults with essentially the same vocabulary size and word-retrieval rate, or else the monolingual children end up with a slight advantage (vocabulary up to 10% larger in their sole language). However, it would be misleading to summarize this result by saying, “Monolingual children end up with a slightly larger vocabulary: 3,300 versus only 3,000 words.” Instead, the result is, “Bilingual children end up with a much larger vocabulary: a total of 6,000 words, consisting of 3,000 English words plus 3,000 Chinese words, instead of 3,300 English words and no Chinese words.”

Studies to date have not demonstrated generalized cognitive differences between bilingual and monolingual people. It is not the case that one group is on the average smarter or thinks more quickly than the other group. Instead, there appear to be specific differences, such as (perhaps)
slightly faster word retrieval and ability to name objects on the part of monolinguals (because they don’t have the problem of selecting among different names, all correct but in different languages familiar to them). Among these specific differences, the most consistently established to date involves what cognitive scientists term “executive function,” and that difference is in favor of bilinguals.

To understand the meaning of executive function, picture a person doing anything at all, e.g., crossing a street. Reflect that we are constantly bombarded by sensory information in many modalities, including sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, plus our own thoughts. Into the pedestrian’s senses flood the sight of billboards and of clouds overhead, the sounds of people talking and birds singing, the smells of the city, the touch sensation of the pedestrian’s feet on the pavement and of his arms swinging at his sides, and thoughts of what his wife said to him at breakfast that morning. If he were not crossing a street, the pedestrian would concentrate on the words of people or on the sight of billboards or on his wife’s most recent words. When crossing a street, though, his survival requires that he concentrate on the sights and sounds of cars approaching at different speeds from both directions, and on the feeling of his feet stepping off the curb. That is, to do anything at all in life requires inhibiting 99% of one’s sensory input and thoughts at any moment, and paying attention to the 1% of input relevant to the task currently at hand. That brain process of executive function, also known as cognitive control, is believed to reside in the brain area known as the pre-frontal cortex. It’s what permits you to pay selective attention, to avoid being distracted, to concentrate on solving a problem, to shift between tasks, and to call up and use the word or bit of information needed at the moment out of your huge stockpile of words and information. That is, executive control is a big deal: it’s crucial to our functioning competently. In children, executive control develops especially over the course of the first five or so years of life.

Bilingual people have a special issue of executive control. Monolingual people hearing a word compare it with their single stock of words, and when uttering a word they draw it from their single stock. But bilingual people must and do keep their languages separate. Every time they hear a word pronounced, they must instantly know according to which set of arbitrary rules to interpret the meaning of those sounds: for instance, a
Spanish/Italian bilingual has learned that the sounds
b-u-rr-o
mean “donkey” in Spanish but “butter” in Italian. Every time bilinguals wish to say something, they must call up the words from the language being used in the current conversation, and not from their other language. Multilingual people participating in a group bilingual conversation, or Scandinavian shop assistants, must switch those arbitrary rules every few minutes or even more often.

The importance of executive control for multilingual people was brought home to me by a disconcerting failure of it on my part. When I went to work in Indonesia in 1979 and began learning the Indonesian language, I had already lived for extended periods in Germany, Peru, and Papua New Guinea, and I had become comfortable at speaking German, Spanish, or Tok Pisin without confusing those languages with each other or with English. I had also learned some other languages (especially Russian) but had never lived in their countries long enough to gain experience of speaking them continually. When I was initially talking with Indonesian friends, I was astonished to discover that my intention of pronouncing an Indonesian word often resulted in my uttering the Russian word with the same meaning, despite the Indonesian and Russian languages being completely unrelated! I had evidently learned to separate English, German, Spanish, and Tok Pisin into four well-controlled pigeonholes, but I was still left with an undifferentiated fifth pigeonhole equivalent to “language other than English, Spanish, German, and Tok Pisin.” Only after more time in Indonesia was I able to inhibit the stock of Russian words lurking out of control in my mind and ready to creep into my Indonesian conversations.