What do you call a person who speaks many languages? A polyglot.
What do you call a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks one language? An English speaker.
Psycholinguists (not to be confused with psycho linguists) study how language is processed in the mind. They research topics such as language acquisition, language production, perception, memory, and problem-solving.
A new study reveals some interesting facts about language in the brain. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brain activity of polyglots (people who speak five or more languages). They noticed that the language regions in the brain light up when a polyglot hears a language they are more proficient in versus one they are less familiar with. Uh oh…while this seems to make sense, there’s one problem. They also found that when a polyglot heard their native language, the language regions in their brain oddly dropped in activity levels as quickly as I do when the temperature gets above 80.
If more brain activity in the language regions correlates to being more proficient in a language, then why does activity dip when speaking in your native tongue? The researchers believe it happens because your native language is simply easier to process and therefore requires less work. In fact, they had previously found that polyglots showed less brain activity when hearing their native language than people who only speak one language.
Fun fact: Learning more languages can change your brain physically. Certain areas will become bigger and more active.
If you’re interested in learning more languages, linguistics is quite useful. Being a linguist won’t make you an immediate polyglot, but it can certainly help; especially with grammar structures.
So Goodbye, Adiós, Sayonara, Namaste, Adjø, Kwaheri, Zàijiàn, Iilaa alliqa, Sampai jumpa!
Read More:
Trafton, Anne. “For people who speak many languages, there’s something special about their native tongue” MIT News, March 10, 2024. https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study-polyglots-brain-processing-native-language-0310.
Saima Malik-Moraleda, Olessia Jouravlev, Maya Taliaferro, Zachary Mineroff, Theodore Cucu, Kyle Mahowald, Idan A Blank, Evelina Fedorenko, Functional characterization of the language network of polyglots and hyperpolyglots with precision fMRI, Cerebral Cortex, Volume 34, Issue 3, March 2024, bhae049, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae049.