Of course, some polyglots and hyperpolyglots I write about in my book Babel No More (just published by Free Press) are (or were) translators, partly because it’s a way to make a living from one’s linguistic experiences. Lomb Kató, a beloved figure in her native Hungary, worked as a translator; she was learning her 17th language, Hebrew, in her 80s. Erik Gunnemark, the Swedish author of The Art and Science of Learning Languages, could translate in 40-odd languages, and Emil Krebs, a German diplomat who died in 1930, was trained as a Chinese translator but said he could work in 31 other languages, as well. The American diplomat and military officer Vernon Walters worked as an interpreter in multiple languages for several US presidents.

A lot of positive attention for Babel No More has come from translators (for instance, Peter Constantine, an award-winning translator, wrote the review for the New York Times). Like hyperpolyglots, they’re passionate lovers of language, deeply involved in languages in a way that most people, even native speakers, aren’t. These abilities involve a specialized kind of linguistic intelligence and skill that outstrips even the best metaphors to explain the practice. And, like hyperpolyglots, they’re misunderstood, underestimated, and overlooked.

But some of the hyperpolyglots didn’t do much translation work at all. The 19th-century Connecticut-born Yankee Elihu Burritt, for instance, taught himself to read in 30 languages. He helped out once a in a while when strange documents in unknown languages showed up, but he mainly worked as a blacksmith, then became a trans-Atlantic postal reformer (he thought letters should cost a penny to mail). In 1806, the first published mention of Italian cardinal and famed language learner Giuseppe Mezzofanti was about a little translation job he did, and later he rooted out potential heresies that were rooted in inapt translations of Scriptures. But he didn’t really spend his time enabling other people’s experiences.

And if you think about it, polyglots and translators aren’t really on the same team. Each practice, in its purest form, takes opposing stances toward the sufficiency of translation. Yes, the polyglot’s relentless accumulation of languages is rooted in the same historical and cultural conditions that helped to shape translation traditions. And yes, translation traditions are oriented in various ways toward meaning-making and meaning-preserving. This isn’t to say that one practice is better than another. Rather, it’s interesting that affinities run so deeply despite these differences.

People become polyglots because they need or want to read texts in their original languages. Sometimes, no translators traffic between that language and the polyglot’s. Sometimes there’s traffic, but the text is too little-known to ever get any attention. Other people become polyglots because they believe the resonances of an original language are so subtle, so sublime, they can’t be sufficiently represented in translation. They also don’t want to be limited to what’s been translated. If you know the language, you can read anything, go anywhere. The polyglot thinks, if that language is good enough for its native speakers, why not for me? The translator thinks, if something in language A is good enough for its native speakers, why not for others?

Of course, not everyone can become a polyglot, so we still need translators. On the other hand, translators can’t translate everything for everyone, so it’s because of that gap that we’ll always have people going down that polyglot path.

The original piece ran in Publishing Perspectives.

The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have little interest in learning to speak another. But is this true?

Since 1980, the United States Census Bureau has asked: “Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English?” The bureau reports that as of 2009, about 20 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. This figure is often taken to indicate the number of bilingual speakers in the United States.

But a moment’s reflection reveals that the bureau’s question about what you speak at home is not equivalent to asking whether you speak more than one language. I have some proficiency in Spanish and was fluent in Mandarin 20 years ago. But when the American Community Survey (an ongoing survey from the Census Bureau) arrived in my mailbox last month, posing that question, I had to answer no, because we speak only English in my home.

I know I’m not alone. There are countless Americans who speak languages other than English outside their homes: not just those of us who have learned other languages in school or through living abroad, but also employers who have learned enough Spanish to speak to their employees; workers in hospitals, clinics, courts and retail stores who have picked up parts of another language to make their jobs easier; soldiers back from Iraq or Afghanistan with some competency in Arabic, Pashto or Dari; third-generation kids studying their heritage language in informal schools on weekends; spouses and partners picking up the language of a loved one’s family; enthusiasts learning languages with computer software like Rosetta Stone. None of the above are identified as bilingual by the Census Bureau’s question.

Every census in the United States since 1890 (except for one, in 1950) has asked about language characteristics, and its question has always seemed to assume that English is the only language relevant for the aspects of life that take place outside the home. This assumption, though outdated, is somewhat understandable. After all, the bureau’s primary goal in asking this question is not to paint a full and complete portrait of the language proficiencies of Americans but rather to track immigrants’ integration into mainstream American society and to ascertain what services they need, and in what languages. (In October, for instance, the Census Bureau released a list of jurisdictions with large numbers of voters who need voting instructions translated in a language other than English.)

Nonetheless, to better map American language abilities, the census should ask the same question that the European Commission asked in its survey in 2006: Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue? (The answer, incidentally, dented Europe’s reputation as highly multilingual: only 56 percent of the respondents, who tended to be younger and more educated, said they could.) Until the census question is refined, claims about American monolingualism will almost certainly be overstated.

The celebrated multilingualism of not just Europe but also the rest of the world may be exaggerated. The hand-wringing about America’s supposed linguistic weakness is often accompanied by the claim that monolinguals make up a small worldwide minority. The Oxford linguist Suzanne Romaine has claimed that bilingualism and multilingualism “are a normal and unremarkable necessity of everyday life for the majority of the world’s population.”

But the statistics tell a murkier story. Recently, the Stockholm University linguist Mikael Parkvall sought out data on global bilingualism and ran into problems. The reliable numbers that do exist cover only 15 percent of the world’s 190-odd countries, and less than one-third of the world’s population. In those countries, Mr. Parkvall calculated (in a study not yet published), the average number of languages spoken either natively or non-natively per person is 1.58. Piecing together the available data for the rest of the world as best he could, he estimated that 80 percent of people on the planet speak 1.69 languages — not high enough to conclude that the average person is bilingual.

Multilinguals may outnumber monolinguals, but it’s not clear by how much. The average American may be no more monolingual or less multilingual than any other average person elsewhere on the planet. At the very least, we can’t say for sure — not in any language.

The original is available online at the New York Times site.

“Can you let the little boy play with the truck?” she asked her son. “No,” he said. Her hand was on the awesome dump truck now. My son didn’t need it back, I told her, he’d played a good turn. At this point, though, she wasn’t going to back down. “He needs to learn how to share,” she said and twisted the awesome dump truck from her son’s hands and passed it to my son. The she walked away, leaving her son to sit in the sand and howl.

Maybe it was just one of those mornings. Maybe she felt she was protecting my son, the younger and smaller of the two. I don’t know. But as I told the story to other people, it became clear that other things were in play. Someone labeled the phenomenon “the sharing police.” If you’re a parent, you’ve seen this on the playground or the local play space. Child A wants Child B’s toy. Parent B gently chides Child B, “We’re going to share our toys, aren’t we?” One way or another, Child B loses the toy. Let me be clear: I’m not against sharing as a virtue or an important aspect of social life. But I do think parents should model it before they try to teach it. When they do, they should teach it to those who are cognitively able to grasp the concept, and to those who have a shot at negotiating the terms—and who might be able to share on their own when adults aren’t around.

My dad friend, G., had a story about the sharing police with a happier ending. One day, his daughter and a boy, both 18 months old, began tussling over a shovel. The other dad wanted to intervene, but G. said, “Let them go for it. We’ll see what happens.” The two toddlers yanked the shovel back and forth a dozen times, then dropped it and moved on. It turned out, they’d wanted some interaction, not the shovel. Yet why had the other dad moved in so quickly? Was it just a part of the good parenting show that adults feel obliged to stage for each other? Or was it something else, as well?

I turned to a book, The Anthropology of Childhood, a powerfully panoramic view of childhood in various cultures and historical periods, written by David Lancy, an anthropologist at Utah State. He’s built a massive database of anthropological descriptions and has a huge number of details at his fingertips. I asked him, what’s going on with parents sticking their noses into situations to make sure that kids share? “My sense from the ethnographic literature,” he wrote in an email, “is that many societies find children’s ‘selfish’ and ‘demanding’ behavior unwelcome and may take explicit steps to change their behavior—even if sharing is not a conspicuous virtue.” But, he added, what’s even more common is ignoring a kid’s tantrums or even punishing them for wanting something.

In his work, Lancy talks about two broad approaches to child-rearing, which he calls “pick when ripe” and “pick when green” models. (To see a PowerPoint presentation by Lancy, look for “Pick When Ripe” here.) In many “pick when ripe” societies, children are barely acknowledged until they’re toddlers; they’re just not seen as viable targets for socializing, and no explicit teaching goes on. In “pick when green” societies (such as ours), it’s never too early to begin teaching them, explicitly and in earnest. (You could say that the 2010 movie Babies featured two babies from each type of society.)

Lancy suggested that the sharing police might be a manifestation of a “pick when green” mentality. “In the contemporary elite, free, unsupervised interactions with peers have been reduced, so maybe these parents feel they have to teach their kids social skills they won’t otherwise pick up through more casual means,” he wrote.

Not all “pick when green” societies handle things in the same way, though. In his 1991 book Preschool in Three Cultures, Joseph Tobin, an educational anthropologist at Arizona State University, described three schools in China, Japan, and the United States. In 2009, he published a follow-up, going back to the same schools 20 years later. In an email to me, he mentioned that in the Japanese school, he witnessed a group of 4-year-old girls fighting over a teddy bear, rolling around on the floor. Like my friend G., the teacher didn’t step in. “Later [the teacher] explains that she sees this as pro-social, and as a form of play, reasoning that the girls don’t want the bear so much as they to have the excitement of tussling over the bear,” Tobin wrote.

obin circled back to my story from the beach, which I’d told him. There’s so much going on in these interactions, including adults’ expectations of each other and people re-experiencing things from their own childhoods, it makes for an “explosive mix,” he said. “We expect parents to have some appropriate ways of dealing with the inequalities of childhood wealth when the parents can’t talk about this with each other.” On his first visit to China, an explicit part of Communist discourse was about de-emphasizing private property, and the stark preschool rooms had barely any toys. Twenty years later, the same school is loaded more equipment than kids could use. “They still fought over things a bit. It had become more American in that regard.” Yet in resolving those issues, the Chinese teachers were more hands-off, like the Japanese ones.

At Tobin’s recommendation, I contacted Jane Katch, a progressive educator at the Touchtone Community School in Grafton, Mass., who has written about the disconnect between what people impose on their kids and what they do in their lives. In one of her books, Under Deadman’s Skin, she looks at what happens when schools forbid violent play, closing off the stage on which kids (and boys, in particular) process the increasing amounts of violence they see in mass media. It’s easier for adults to step in and say, “No violent play,” than to listen to kids talk about what the play means, or even tolerate the messiness that the learning process takes. (She was featured talking about this in the PBS documentary, Raising Cain.)

The situation on the beach is similar, she said. “The mother who wanted her 5-year-old to share the toys didn’t teach her child to share. She taught him that whoever is strongest can take the toy. First of all, I think it’s misguided. I think she’s a nice person and wants her son to share. But instead of taking the time to think about what sharing is and what a relationship over sharing might be, it’s just, ‘You need to share.’ I don’t think that’s an effective way to teach sharing.”

Contemporary parents are also beset with an anxiety over not wanting their children to feel frustration, sadness, or any negative emotion. Katch, who has taught nursery school and kindergarten for more than 30 years, has seen this increase since 9/11. “The more people are worried about the world in which their kids are going to grow up,” she said, “the more they’ve become focused on trying to protect their kids from any thing negative that might happen instead of building resilience.”

Which I was willing to accept, except that back on the beach, the mom had exposed her kid to massive disappointment—all in the name, or so it seemed, of giving my kid (whom she didn’t know) what he wanted. What did she get out of that?

In a way, these playground conflicts over the sharing of toys, as along with the sharing of ideas, space, and even time, are a window on the center of the American experience. How much stuff should one person have? How should we treat people with no stuff? How should we treat less powerful people?

Back to the beach: Ten minutes later, my son abandoned the dump truck, awesome as it was, for other things, and the other kid swooped in to rescue his truck. Half an hour later we bumped into him at the bottom of the slide, and my son asked for the truck. “No,” the boy barked. “You took a really long turn, and I’m not going to let you have it.” That seemed clear enough. I asked the boy: Where’d he get the truck? His grandma gave it to him. It’s really awesome. Yes, he said, and pointed out some places where it had broken. After a couple of minutes, the boy turned to my son and offered him the awesome dump truck to him. “Here, do you want to play with this?”

Read the original piece at Slate.

But “uh” and “um” don’t deserve eradication; there’s no good reason to uproot them. People have been pausing and filling their pauses with a neutral vowel (or sometimes with an actual word) for as long as we’ve had language, which is about 100,000 years. If listeners are so naturally repelled by “uhs” and “ums,” you’d think those sounds would have been eliminated long before now. The opposite is true: Filled pauses appear in all of the world’s languages, and the anti-ummers have no way to explain, if they’re so ugly, what “euh” in French, or “äh” and “ähm” in German, or “eto” and “ano” in Japanese are doing in human language at all.

In the history of oratory and public speaking, the notion that good speaking requires umlessness is actually a fairly recent, and very American, invention. It didn’t emerge as a cultural standard until the early 20th century, when the phonograph and radio suddenly held up to speakers’ ears all the quirks and warbles that, before then, had flitted by. Another development was the codification of public speaking as an academic subject. Counting “ums” and noting perfect fluency gave teachers something to score.

What’s more, “uhs” and “ums” do not necessarily damage a speaker’s standing. Recently, a University of Michigan research team turned their attention to phone survey interviewers. They found that the most successful interviewers—the ones who convinced respondents to stay on the line and answer questions—spoke moderately fast and paused occasionally, either silently or with a filler “uh” or “um.” “If interviewers made no pauses at all,” the lead researcher, Jose Benki, told Science Daily, “they had the lowest success rates getting people to agree to do the survey. We think that’s because they sound too scripted.” Speaking with a certain number of “uhs” and “ums,” it seems, may actually enhance a speaker’s credibility.

Blithely unaware of the evidence, some parents—call them linguistic tiger moms—strive to keep filled pauses out of their kids’ mouths. In April, Sarah Groves wrote an essay in the Christian Science Monitor about training her children to be umless. Her son was torturing her with questions like, “That man, um, not Hector, um er that man, not Paris, um, that man, not …” After discussing the situation with her husband (“I want to love them by teaching them to be articulate”), she told her son, “Before you speak you must think, ‘This is what I’m going to say,’ and then when you start to speak you mustn’t think about anything else except what you decided you were going to say. Then you say it, quick and clear, with no um’s and no er’s.” Apparently the 5-year-old mastered umlessness in two days.

Yet studies suggest that “uh” and “um” play an active role in how we learn language and communicate. A University of Rochester lab published a paper this spring showing that kids over 2 were more likely to pay attention to an unfamiliar object if the speaker said “uh” before stating its name. Presumably, this tactic gives children a leg up on parsing an adult’s speech. Take the example of the mother who says to her child, “No, that wasn’t the telephone, honey. That was the, uh, timer.” The “uh” indicates that there’s a word coming up that might be new and unfamiliar, so extra attention is required.
Of course, “uh” and “um” don’t have some magic monopoly on focusing a listener’s attention. In a study published in PLoS ONE last May, Martin Corley and Robert J. Hartsuiker reported that listeners’ recognition benefits from any delay before a word, whether it’s a silent pause, a filled pause, or a musical tone. The delay “attunes the attention.”

In the Rochester study, kids under 2 didn’t respond to “uh” at all—they didn’t seem to tune out or tune in—which probably means they hadn’t yet learned to interpret “uh” as a clue to adults’ intentions. The authors suggest this ability appears at some point in the second year. They don’t say anything about when kids start to say “um,” which must happen on a different time line, because my 20-month-old son recently uttered his first. Given my fascination with filled pauses, it was a happy day, and I considered sending out greeting cards to celebrate the accomplishment.

The momentous exchange went something like this:

Grandfather: Hey, Iver, how’s it hanging?

Iver: Um … wheels?

Read the original piece in Slate.