languages. Hudson had found that community-based multilingualism, where everyone, not just special individuals, spoke many languages, had a ceiling of five languages. So someone who spoke six or more had to be exceptional, Hudson reasoned. They weren’t just polyglots, theywere hyper polyglots.
Hyperpolyglots caught Hudson’s attention because they were beyond the pale of linguistic theory. With only one exception that he knewof—the study of a severely mentally impaired man named Christopher who knew twenty languages—no one had ever addressed the issue. No longer a professor affiliated with an institution, Hudson had nothing to lose by following up a fascinatingbut ignored phenomenon, though N. disappeared shortly after his letter was published.
If you believe that language is innate and uniquely human, then the question about how many languages a person can learn would seem trivial. Learning one language is itself an evolutionary marvel; learning many of them, well, that’s gilding the lily. A language superlearner deserves about the same attentionas an ultramarathon runner—accolades and respect for pushing basic human equipment to an extreme, but not the scientific interest you’d give to, say, a human who could breathe underwater or flap his arms and fly.
If pushed to explain the hyperpolyglot phenomenon, an innatist might say that every baby’s brain comes equipped with a primordial universal grammar, a sort of periodic table that containsthe basic properties of all the world’s languages and all the dimensions along which they differ. Coming into contact with a real language (or several) triggers some properties from that table. The ones left untriggered disappear. Because all the languages on the planet differ along a finite number of dimensions, even an adult should be able to retrigger these properties and their permutations,given enough time. Theoretically, there should be no limits on how many languages a person could learn. If most people don’t, it’s because they’d rather carve whalebone, grow the perfect orchid, or sit on the beach.
Those of an opposing theoretical bent, the emergentists, see language not as inborn but as a behavior that grows out of a set of simpler, overlapping cognitive skills. At certainmoments in a child’s development, such skills are enhanced by experiences that bootstrap them to a higher level of complexity. In this account, protogrammars don’t have to exist in babies’ brains—as expert learners, humans can fill in gaps from their environment. Accordingly, an emergentist’s explanation of the hyperpolyglot goes something like this: people with a gift for learning languages mustrecognize and parse patterns extremely well. Surely this makes a kind of intuitive sense. But here the account stalls. At what point does parsing patterns become knowing a language? And how canyou escape the influence of your earliest language—or harness your knowledge of it—to become fluent in later ones?
Meanwhile, the applied side of linguistics, which deals with foreign-language educationand literacy, developed the notion of language-learning “aptitude.” It was really a measure of how quickly a student could achieve proficiency in an extra language in an allotted time period. As the concept was first developed in the 1950s, aptitude had four dimensions—how well a person can recall sounds; how sensitive she is to grammatical patterns; how well she can produce new sentences basedon what she analyzes; and how well she learns how words in the first and second languages connect. Later, the notion evolved, adding new understandings of how memory works.
But aptitude was never applied to hyperpolyglottery. The bulk of research on aptitude had been done by the bureaucrats of the foreign-language education establishment in Washington, D.C. (and other capitals), where the typicallearner of interest was an adult who’d mastered one language well enough for spycraft and diplomacy. The
Hyperpolyglots caught Hudson’s attention because they were beyond the pale of linguistic theory. With only one exception that he knewof—the study of a severely mentally impaired man named Christopher who knew twenty languages—no one had ever addressed the issue. No longer a professor affiliated with an institution, Hudson had nothing to lose by following up a fascinatingbut ignored phenomenon, though N. disappeared shortly after his letter was published.
If you believe that language is innate and uniquely human, then the question about how many languages a person can learn would seem trivial. Learning one language is itself an evolutionary marvel; learning many of them, well, that’s gilding the lily. A language superlearner deserves about the same attentionas an ultramarathon runner—accolades and respect for pushing basic human equipment to an extreme, but not the scientific interest you’d give to, say, a human who could breathe underwater or flap his arms and fly.
If pushed to explain the hyperpolyglot phenomenon, an innatist might say that every baby’s brain comes equipped with a primordial universal grammar, a sort of periodic table that containsthe basic properties of all the world’s languages and all the dimensions along which they differ. Coming into contact with a real language (or several) triggers some properties from that table. The ones left untriggered disappear. Because all the languages on the planet differ along a finite number of dimensions, even an adult should be able to retrigger these properties and their permutations,given enough time. Theoretically, there should be no limits on how many languages a person could learn. If most people don’t, it’s because they’d rather carve whalebone, grow the perfect orchid, or sit on the beach.
Those of an opposing theoretical bent, the emergentists, see language not as inborn but as a behavior that grows out of a set of simpler, overlapping cognitive skills. At certainmoments in a child’s development, such skills are enhanced by experiences that bootstrap them to a higher level of complexity. In this account, protogrammars don’t have to exist in babies’ brains—as expert learners, humans can fill in gaps from their environment. Accordingly, an emergentist’s explanation of the hyperpolyglot goes something like this: people with a gift for learning languages mustrecognize and parse patterns extremely well. Surely this makes a kind of intuitive sense. But here the account stalls. At what point does parsing patterns become knowing a language? And how canyou escape the influence of your earliest language—or harness your knowledge of it—to become fluent in later ones?
Meanwhile, the applied side of linguistics, which deals with foreign-language educationand literacy, developed the notion of language-learning “aptitude.” It was really a measure of how quickly a student could achieve proficiency in an extra language in an allotted time period. As the concept was first developed in the 1950s, aptitude had four dimensions—how well a person can recall sounds; how sensitive she is to grammatical patterns; how well she can produce new sentences basedon what she analyzes; and how well she learns how words in the first and second languages connect. Later, the notion evolved, adding new understandings of how memory works.
But aptitude was never applied to hyperpolyglottery. The bulk of research on aptitude had been done by the bureaucrats of the foreign-language education establishment in Washington, D.C. (and other capitals), where the typicallearner of interest was an adult who’d mastered one language well enough for spycraft and diplomacy. The
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