The diglossia club (or the global community of bilingual brains)

If you understand this sentence from beginning to end, despite the sudden shift into English (despite the sudden switch to English), the guard will look favorably on you. The same if you understand this other one, qui, contre toute attentive, devient francophone (who, against all odds, became a French speaker). You will also have one foot in if you この日本語の文章が読める (You can read this text in Japanese) or if you could read sentences combining any pair of languages. This is the club of the diglossiathe global community of people bilingual. Now, how do you know if you are part of it? How select is the club? Why does it even exist? What characterizes its members? Are there benefits to belonging? The answers, hier unten, lieber Leser (down here, dear reader).

Admission

Unlike other entities, the guards of the diglossia club They are not pathovic, but intellectual. It is these figures who, over time, have debated what conditions a person must meet to be considered bilingual. About 100 years ago, income was very restricted. Around 1930, for example, Leonard Bloomfield He stated that only a person who speaks a second language at the same level of proficiency as its native speakers can be called bilingual. From that perspective, the club would be quite elitist. In fact, it would exclude people who communicate effectively in various languages ​​with grammatical errors or marked accents, such as Pope Francisco (whose errors of agreement do not hinder their global preaching) or the linguist Roman Jacobson (who was said to speak six languages, but all in Russian…). Thus, even if you met the conditions in the first paragraph, your membership would not be guaranteed.

Today, admission conditions are more lax. Although there is no complete agreement, bilingual is usually considered any person who knows two or more languages ​​at any level of competence that allows them to meet their communicative objectives. Of course, by this criterion, the club is gigantic. François Grosjean (French psycholinguist, former Director of the Language and Speech Processing Laboratory at the University of Neuchâtel) estimates that one in two people is bilingual. And he doesn’t exaggerate. In Argentina, reports the World Atlas, at least 30% of the population would speak two languages. In the European UnionAccording to official data, almost 60% of the population can converse in more than one language. In Africa, indicates the portal Ethnologue, it is difficult to find people who cannot do it in at least three. Even at a global level there are surprising data. For example, Ethnologue reveals that, of the 1.5 billion people who use English daily, almost 70% are non-native speakers.

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These figures are notable, but not entirely surprising. In the world there are approximately 200 sovereign states and 7,000 living languages. Thus, with a ratio of languages ​​to states of 35 to 1, linguistic contact within national territories is inevitable. Furthermore, almost all school systems include foreign language classes in their curricular designs, even before primary education. In turn, exposure to different languages ​​is maximized by the globalization of the entertainment industry, tourism, business relations, diplomacy, language courses and, of course, the existence of the Internet. So many factors come together in favor of the club, that the challenge, in reality, is to find people who are clearly left out (read, monolingual).

Members

Having the credential presupposes several things. Unlike people monolingualcountless members can watch foreign series on Netflix without activating the subtitles, or reading imported novels in their original version, or singing (and not just humming) your favorite songs from the ranking Billboard. In addition, many owe bilingualism the expansion of their work and interpersonal possibilities. These are obvious, of course; But what is perhaps not so evident is that diglossic people have cognitive particularities.

Argenteam web portal that is dedicated to movie subtitles.  07/12/2023 Photo: Rafael Mario Quinteros - FTP CLARIN MRQB-00274.JPG ZArgenteam web portal that is dedicated to movie subtitles. 07/12/2023 Photo: Rafael Mario Quinteros – FTP CLARIN MRQB-00274.JPG Z

Perhaps the most striking is the high demand of its inhibitory system, namely, the set of neurocognitive mechanisms which allows us to suppress actions, states or information irrelevant to ongoing events. Let’s put it this way: when a monolingual person sees a hammer and wants to refer to it, they must not only activate the word ‘hammer’ but also inhibit several other words they could have said, such as ‘tool’ or ‘mace’. Now, this inhibitory load increases in the case of a bilingual person, who, in addition, must suppress possible words from their other language (such as ‘hammer’, ‘tool’ and ‘mace’, in the case of English). Thus, an act as common as naming things entails an added cognitive load for club members.

Obviously, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, due to deliberate decisions or occasional slips, phenomena occur that are also exclusive to bilingualism. The most common are the mixing of languages ​​(as in the famous “Hasta la vista, baby”) or the change of languages ​​(when languages ​​alternate phrase by phrase, without merging them into the same statement). Likewise, unlike monolingual people, club members are capable of translating, that is, facing a statement in one of their languages ​​and reformulating it in the other. It’s more: neuroscientific studies have shown that, when a bilingual person processes words in one of their languages, they unconsciously translate them into their other language. All of this, of course, has no place in a strictly monolingual person.

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General Assembly of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC).General Assembly of the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC).

In addition, brain peculiarities have also been documented in several members. A high percentage of bilinguals, compared to monolinguals, present differences in the amount of gray matter and the connectivity of neural regions involved in vocabulary processing and inhibitory control, among other functions. It has even been seen that the richer the vocabulary of the foreign language, the greater the volume of the temporal lobe, associated with lexical processing. It seems that, by the time you enter the club, your head is no longer the same as before.

It is worth clarifying that these phenomena do not occur with the same magnitude or efficiency in all cases. It happens that, housing some 4,000 million people, the diglossia club is very heterogeneous. There are members who are very proficient in their second language, others who are quite proficient, and others with basic skills. There are members who have been in communion with it since birth and others who joined it later. There are members who use it a lot for speaking and little for reading, while others have the opposite pattern. There are members who speak two similar languages ​​(such as Spanish and French) and others who navigate between dissimilar languages ​​(such as Spanish and the mandarin chinese). Each of these factors influences how much an affiliate’s brain differs from that of an outsider.

Benefits

Membership, at least in some cases, would bring benefits. Cognitive advantages have been reported in thousands of diglossics. Some of them would be observed in the inhibitory capacities that we mentioned before. Just as a muscle strengthens when an athlete demands it in the gym, the inhibitory system would strengthen when a bilingual demands it during everyday speech. This would increase performance in other, non-linguistic tasks that use such a system. For example, diverse groups of bilinguals outperform their monolingual peers on tasks that require inhibiting negative emotions or perceptual distractions. Advantages have also been documented in other cognitive systems, such as cognitive flexibility. This would happen because the need to alternate languages ​​on a daily basis would enhance the general ability to “jump” between mental schemes (for example, stop thinking about certain stimuli in terms of color and conceive them according to their shape). In sum, the bilingualism It would enhance skills that participate in daily speech but that exceed said behavior.

Presidential interpreter Walter Kerr speaks nine languages.  Here, in the middle of two former leaders: the British Boris Johnson and Alberto Fernández.Presidential interpreter Walter Kerr speaks nine languages. Here, in the middle of two former leaders: the British Boris Johnson and Alberto Fernández.

Likewise, it would seem that constant wandering between two languages ​​could promote brain health. This is suggested by various research on the so-called “cognitive reserve”, that is, the resilience of the brain in the face of the functional decline caused by aging and which is exacerbated by certain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. Some studies indicate that club members, compared to monolinguals, would have a four-year delay in the development of dementia symptoms. Likewise, other studies have shown that certain bilinguals with dementia would exhibit the same cognitive ability as their monolingual peers despite greater progression of the disease. Together with moderate exercise, a balanced diet and sleep hygiene, bilingualism would therefore be a neuroprotective factor. This is one of the most publicized incentives to join the club.

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Now, you will have noticed that this entire section is written, mostly, in the conditional. This is because for every study that has shown a cognitive advantage of bilingualism, there is another that shows no differences between bilinguals and monolinguals. Which ones are true, then? Those who show benefits of bilingualism or those who don’t? Possibly both. As we noted before, the club is so vast that its members differ in when and how they acquired their second language, how skilled they are in it, how frequently they use it, and so on… These factors have not been systematically addressed in the scientific literature and it is They probably explain a good part of the heterogeneity of the results. Thus, the diglossia club may well entail benefits, but we still do not know exactly for which of its members.

Affiliate

It is very likely that you already belong to the club; But, if not, there are plenty of reasons to join. He bilingualism expands work, recreational, educational and social avenues. Open the doors to stories and cultures that may otherwise be elusive. It could even benefit your cognitive performance and brain health. It is never too late to join and there have never been so many resources to do so. The doors are open. Você vai passar? (The doors are open. Do you want to come in?)

Adolfo García directs the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences (Univ. of San Andrés) and is a researcher at the Global Brain Health Institute (University of California) and the Department of Linguistics and Literature (Faculty of Humanities, Univ. of Santiago de Chile).

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