The gift of tongues

English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s in it for us? And what, more seriously, are the implications if we decide not to bother?

Digging deeply into these questions, Marek Kohn’s book asks what it actually means to have some mastery of another language (is that the same as being ‘fluent’, or being able to ‘speak’ another language?), and looks at language acquisition, at how the language we happen to speak can alter perception, whether there are cognitive benefits to multiple language use, and what roles the state can play in determining how languages are valued or stigmatised.

The answer, in each case, is — unsurprisingly — ‘it’s actually quite complicated’. But Kohn expresses the complexities with great lucidity, making them precisely the reason the subject is interesting at all. Kohn is a science writer, and while he uses dizzying numbers of scientific studies to further his arguments, he’s especially engaging on their failings: why are some of these studies contradictory or unreliable or misleading? We don’t get any easy answers. What we get instead is something more frustratingly inconclusive, but richer too.

The reception of even robust scientific results is, naturally, distorted by culture and ideology. Kohn touches upon some of the circumstances that have led to people in the UK being harassed for the audacity of not speaking English in a public place (we’ve all seen footage). He is cautious about judgment, though, preferring to consider generally the ways in which a language might be used to define the boundaries of a group: to define who are the ‘insiders’, and therefore also, by exclusion, who are the outsiders. (I’d argue the nativist implications of this, illogical and hypocritical though they are, are even darker than he acknowledges.