Glumly, I recount my difficulties at learning the language, despite my best efforts. I join Athanasopoulos for a chat while my performance is being analysed by his team. But even then, there had been clues… Now, without any accompanying human interaction, the rules governing the sounds I’m hearing remain elusive, and at the end of the session I have to admit defeat. The experience reminds me of a time I arrived in a rural town a few hours outside Beijing and was forced to make myself understood in a language I could neither speak nor read, among people for whom English was similarly alien. I decide to be mathematical about it and get out pen and paper to plot any rules that emerge, determined not to “fail” the test. Here I have no such clues and, it being a made-up language, I can’t even rely on picking up similarities to languages I already know.Īfter a time, though, I begin to feel a pattern might be emerging with the syntax and sounds. The speaker might point to the snowflake as they speak, use their hands to demonstrate shapes or their fingers to count out numbers, for example. Usually, when interacting in a foreign language, there are clues to help you decipher the meaning. The task is profoundly strange and incredibly difficult. As you might expect, his lab is a Babel of different nationalities and languages – but no one here grew up speaking Syntaflake. Professor of psycholinguistics and bilingual cognition at Lancaster University, he’s at the forefront of a new wave of research into the bilingual mind. It’s part of an experiment by Panos Athanasopoulos, an ebullient Greek with a passion for languages. The only catch is that the descriptions are in a completely invented language called Syntaflake. All I have to do is decide which snowflake is being described. As each pair of snowflakes appears, I hear a description of one of them through the headphones. I am sitting in a laboratory, headphones on, looking at pictures of snowflakes on a computer. Moreover, researchers are finding a swathe of health benefits from speaking more than one language, including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia. Multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority, and perhaps to be missing out. People are increasingly expected to speak, read and write at least one of a handful of “super” languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish or Arabic, as well. Many countries have more than one official national language – South Africa has 11. Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60 to 75 per cent – speak at least two languages. “I went to Germany before I came here, so I also speak German,” he adds. For example, Theo’s mother’s language is Sotho, his father’s is Zulu, he learned Xhosa and Ndebele from his friends and neighbours, and English and Afrikaans at school. In Johannesburg, where they are from, most people speak at least five languages, says one of them, Theo Morris. With friendly smiles, they both switch easily to English, explaining that they are South Africans and had been speaking Xhosa. Out of curiosity, I interrupt them to ask what they are speaking. It’s a shame, because their conversation looks fun and interesting, especially to a nosy person like me. They are discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud guffaws. In a cafe in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter, tossing words back and forth.
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