massively multilingual person? Barely interesting.
Even if hyperpolyglots had been examined through the lens of aptitude, the concept had shortcomings. For instance, standardized tests of aptitude tend to predict a student’s grades in certain kinds of classrooms better than they predict real-worldlanguage use. They also don’t predict how adept a person could ultimately become in a language—high aptitude is no guarantee that abilities won’t peak quickly. More important, there’s no agreement on what aptitude is made of, how much it can be cultivated, and how much is inborn. Aptitude could make for a potent political time bomb in many educational settings. Holding out high aptitude implieslow aptitude, which, in turn, implies the promise of handing out educational resources on an unequal basis. If the aptitudes you find striking happen to correspond with certain genders, races, or classes, then you’d look as if you were cementing old privileges. It’s safer to assume that all students possess a generic cognitive profile and teach them with fitting uniformity.
Hudson was stymied.Even if the feats of successful language learners are no longer explained through mystical sources—whether visits from angels or pacts with demons—we can’t ignore how some people arefaster learners and better users of their languages. Perhaps they can read shades of meaning more acutely, even mimicking sounds more exactly. Some of these people, who are on the high end of a normal curve, countas experts. Yet others go far, far beyond this. How to explain this?
As he told me in a series of exchanges by email and phone, Hudson himself worked hard to learn various languages before traveling to the places they were spoken. He’d put in the required time on task. Yet after coming home, he found that his abilities rapidly and inevitably dwindled. Others learned faster and kept their knowledgelonger than he did. How did hyperpolyglots retain their skills? Could average language learners do the same?
Hudson was also alarmed by a negative trend in foreign-language education in Britain. Politicians lectured Britons on learning languages so they could get jobs in the European Union, while universities removed foreign-language requirements and shut down language departments when enrollmentsdropped. Further, the government was constantly exporting English teachers, textbooks, courses, and programs, helping the country to earn £1.3 billion a year. In other words, learning languages was for citizens of other countries—who would then compete with Britons for jobs. The irony was underscored by the fact that by 2005, immigrants had transformed London into a place where at least 307languages are spoken, making the capital of one of the most monolingual countries in the European Union the most multilingual city on the planet. A new approach to foreign-language education was direly needed.
Meanwhile, in the United States, a long-documented shortage of language analysts in US intelligence agencies meant that evidence of an imminent terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, satundiscovered in a queue until much too late. As it plotted its counterterrorism strategy, the US government was in a bind: unwilling to trust intelligence work to recent immigrants (especially ones from the same cultural groups that al-Qaeda drew from), the national fear of anything foreign had long snuffed out the immigrant-family languages it now desperately needed for a range of government functions.Coupled with a peacetime vacuum of political will to build a linguistically expert workforce,these trends, some of which dated back decades, ruined some of the country’s greatest human resources: linguistic fluency and cultural knowledge. Experts had long warned of such a shortage; in 1980, Senator Paul Simon published a searing jeremiad, The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis . Yet the necessary funding for something as intangible as language could be
Even if hyperpolyglots had been examined through the lens of aptitude, the concept had shortcomings. For instance, standardized tests of aptitude tend to predict a student’s grades in certain kinds of classrooms better than they predict real-worldlanguage use. They also don’t predict how adept a person could ultimately become in a language—high aptitude is no guarantee that abilities won’t peak quickly. More important, there’s no agreement on what aptitude is made of, how much it can be cultivated, and how much is inborn. Aptitude could make for a potent political time bomb in many educational settings. Holding out high aptitude implieslow aptitude, which, in turn, implies the promise of handing out educational resources on an unequal basis. If the aptitudes you find striking happen to correspond with certain genders, races, or classes, then you’d look as if you were cementing old privileges. It’s safer to assume that all students possess a generic cognitive profile and teach them with fitting uniformity.
Hudson was stymied.Even if the feats of successful language learners are no longer explained through mystical sources—whether visits from angels or pacts with demons—we can’t ignore how some people arefaster learners and better users of their languages. Perhaps they can read shades of meaning more acutely, even mimicking sounds more exactly. Some of these people, who are on the high end of a normal curve, countas experts. Yet others go far, far beyond this. How to explain this?
As he told me in a series of exchanges by email and phone, Hudson himself worked hard to learn various languages before traveling to the places they were spoken. He’d put in the required time on task. Yet after coming home, he found that his abilities rapidly and inevitably dwindled. Others learned faster and kept their knowledgelonger than he did. How did hyperpolyglots retain their skills? Could average language learners do the same?
Hudson was also alarmed by a negative trend in foreign-language education in Britain. Politicians lectured Britons on learning languages so they could get jobs in the European Union, while universities removed foreign-language requirements and shut down language departments when enrollmentsdropped. Further, the government was constantly exporting English teachers, textbooks, courses, and programs, helping the country to earn £1.3 billion a year. In other words, learning languages was for citizens of other countries—who would then compete with Britons for jobs. The irony was underscored by the fact that by 2005, immigrants had transformed London into a place where at least 307languages are spoken, making the capital of one of the most monolingual countries in the European Union the most multilingual city on the planet. A new approach to foreign-language education was direly needed.
Meanwhile, in the United States, a long-documented shortage of language analysts in US intelligence agencies meant that evidence of an imminent terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, satundiscovered in a queue until much too late. As it plotted its counterterrorism strategy, the US government was in a bind: unwilling to trust intelligence work to recent immigrants (especially ones from the same cultural groups that al-Qaeda drew from), the national fear of anything foreign had long snuffed out the immigrant-family languages it now desperately needed for a range of government functions.Coupled with a peacetime vacuum of political will to build a linguistically expert workforce,these trends, some of which dated back decades, ruined some of the country’s greatest human resources: linguistic fluency and cultural knowledge. Experts had long warned of such a shortage; in 1980, Senator Paul Simon published a searing jeremiad, The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis . Yet the necessary funding for something as intangible as language could be
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