This is an afterword I wrote for the French and Mandarin editions of Babel No More in 2016. Unless you read the book in those editions, you haven't read it. I'm putting the original English version here, virtually as I wrote it. If I were to write another afterword, there would be even more to add in the way of science and the impact of my book.
On the occasion of the publication of French and Mandarin translations of Babel No More, I’m delighted to write an afterword that updates readers on changes to the world of hyperpolyglots since I wrote the original English version.
When Babel No More was released in the US in January of 2012, it was greeted with a huge amount of international attention. That indicated the huge amount of interest in language learning that exists in the world and the fascination with feats of massive multilingualism and high intensity language learning. The book was reviewed in publications in the United Kingdom, Italy, Mexico, Colombia, the People’s Republic of China, India, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Israel, and (surprisingly, some would say) the United States, while bloggers in Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic, and other countries also wrote about it. Thus far, it’s been translated into Russian, Korean, and Arabic, and I’m delighted to see it coming out in French and Mandarin, as well.
That fascination and interest with language learning and polyglottery was expressed in dozens of emails from people who wanted to tell me about their impressive language exploits. “I just finished your book yesterday and want to thank you for an excellent read. I'm keen on languages and in many ways the book helped me to understand myself,” someone wrote. “Great to hear someone has taken an interest in the world of hyperpolyglots,” someone else wrote. “I have probably had a go at about 20 languages. Both my parents are polyglots and I have got a triple dose! I know the following well: French, German, Spanish Italian Russian Polish Hebrew Arabic Mandarin Chinese others reasonable include Latin Yiddish Danish plus some of Swedish, Ancient Greek, Portuguese and Romanian. I don't know how I hold them all in my head - but I do! I do get a little mixed up sometimes and rusty but surprisingly not that much.” A lot of notes came from teenaged language aficionados. “I can definitely say that it was simultaneously one of the best and geekiest sixteenth birthday presents ever received,” one person wrote. “Besides being a very good read, it also piqued my interest in pursuing a degree in linguistics.” Other notes of gratitude came from people who felt lonely and misunderstood because of their affinity for learning languages; others wrote to say they now understood a polyglot friend or family member better. Clearly the book had struck a chord. I was most surprised that high intensity language learning was so widespread. Where were these people when I was writing? I joked. My only regret is not being able to sit down with everyone who wrote to hear their language stories.
Polyglots can also connect with each other in new ways. One development is a series of regular meet-ups for polyglots by at least three different groups of organizers on multiple continents. As of early 2016, several meetings had happened in Europe and North America. I spoke at the Polyglot Conference in New York City, which was organized by Richard Simcott, Alex Rawlings, and Ellen Jovin, and included talks on languages, learning, and the polyglot life. The conference was very multilingual, attended by 400 people from 42 countries with more than 37 native languages. It was also very polyglot: the attenders reported an average repertoire of 7 languages apiece. Apart from Erik Gunnemark’s Amici Linguarum meetings and the Most Multilingual Belgian and European contests (which were described in the pages of the book you’re holding), the Polyglot Conferences and other meetings are the first planned meetings of large groups of polyglots in human history. As I joked in New York City, these meetings should help polyglots meet each other and start polyglot families. With the advantages of genetics, family culture, and exposure, those subsequent generations would be impressively multilingual.
One notable characteristic of the New York City Polyglot Conference was the presence of so many women. In fact, 184 men and 114 women registered (along with 122 others who didn’t use a gender-specific tag when they signed up). These figures represent a more equitable gender distribution than one might expect from the history of polyglottery, where males predominate. (Babel No More mentions two women, Lomb Kató and Helen Abadzi – I would have added more, had I known about them.) I’m often asked why this seeming imbalance exists – does it signify something about inherent male abilities? No, it’s not, I usually say. It’s more an artifact of historical periods where men possessed access to education and leisure time for study and women didn’t. Now that societal norms have changed, we might expect the gender mix among the massively multilingual, high intensity language learning set to be more balanced.
Another gender dynamic is at work: Men tend to overstate the size of their linguistic repertoires, which adds to the perception that more men than women know lots of languages. Why do I suspect this? In addition to the online survey of people who know 6 or more languages, I ran another survey aimed at monolinguals. By coincidence, respondents were overwhelmingly male in the first survey and female in the second. Here’s where things get interesting: even though the second survey was aimed at monolinguals, I included a question about previous language learning. Surprisingly, a large number of so-identified monolinguals said that they’d studied two or more languages. In other words, though they had studied other languages, they only claimed one language in their repertoires. I’ll venture to claim this is legitimate difference between men and women in the language learning realm: men are more likely to count languages they’ve studied (and do not have appreciable current proficiency in) than women are. The difference isn’t biological. It reflects cultural expectations of masculine performance in which more is better.
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I’ve been happy to see developments in neuroscience-related language acquisition research revealing more aspects of how inherited biology interacts with learning environments to produce exceptional learners. (Some of this work was inspired by Babel No More, which has been cited in at least two papers. [Note: By 2025, this number has increased substantially.) One project happened at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, where researchers have tried to figure out what distinguishes adults who learned a second language to a very high degree of proficiency. Was it simply a matter of hard work?
The researchers assembled a group of around 500 employees from federal agencies who had high levels of proficiency in a language they’d begun learning as adults, and they were given a series of tasks to test their memory, ability to focus, and sensitivity to language sounds. On the first task, subjects listened to a series of consonants, with three presented every second, and had to recall the last six consonants they heard, testing their working memory. In a related task, which also tested working memory, they were shown a series of one or two syllable-length nonsense words, then they were prompted with another set of words and had to immediately indicate whether or not the items in the second set had been present in the first. At the time, neither subjects nor researchers knew how central the results of these working memory tasks would be to measuring high-level aptitude.
Another task that proved important was a test of associative memory, or how well someone links new information to what they already know. Subjects learned 20 pairs of words, one English and the other in nonsense language. Several minutes later, they were presented with the nonsense word and had to type its corresponding English word. At the outset, researchers suspected that associative memory would prove to be important, as it had been included in the aptitude tests of the 1950s.
Next was a set of tasks that measured a person’s ability to filter out noise and deal with distraction, such as throwing in an unrelated visual cue and seeing if the person could inhibit the impulse to look. Next, subjects heard a list of five words, then saw two other words that were synonyms with words on the list; they had to select which word corresponded with the largest number of words. The time it took to make a selection was measured, as was whether or not a person chose correctly. This was a test of a person’s long-term memory.
Subjects were then asked to learn sequences of patterns made by an asterisk that appears in one of four boxes as well as discern speech vocalizations that sound the same to most English speakers. For example, they were asked to distinguish between two consonants in Hindi that, to English speakers, sound the same. There was another test involving two sounds from Russian. The researchers could have used sounds from languages other than Hindi or Russian, but the goal was to see whether people could pick up subtle sound differences despite their English-speaking background. One might think that listening abilities would be a central part of high-level learning, but the results eventually showed otherwise.
Before the participants took the half-day long tests, they’d been sorted according to how well they knew a second language. The ones who performed well at speaking, writing, and listening their second languages were labeled “high attainers,” while those who were good at only one of those skills were labeled “mixed attainers.” CASL researchers wanted to see which of the particular abilities they had just tested for—whether short-term memory, acoustic sensitivity, or one of the others—was most prevalent among the high attainer group. As it turned out, those able to learn patterns, remember sounds quickly, and associate new information were much more likely to be in the high attainment group. (In more technical jargon, they had strong implicit learning abilities, strong working memory, and good associative memory.) Also, the test could predict with 70 percent accuracy who was a high language attainer. It was the first solid evidence that those were the skills that would likely ensure long-term language learning success.
The US government and its military has paid for a huge amount of this research (CASL receives some of its funding from the Department of Defense) because it wants to make language training more effective for soldiers, diplomats, and spies. Over the decades, the relevant agencies have discovered that the existing tests of language learning aptitude didn’t reliably predict who will acquire high-level skills, because aptitude is more complex than second language acquisition researchers had known. Rather than a static set of cognitive traits that one applies across one’s language journey, “aptitude” is now thought of as traits that lend themselves more (or less) to various stages in that journey. What makes one a good beginning learner don’t necessarily help with higher levels of proficiency. To put it another way: different aptitudes lead to different levels of attainment.
What CASL researchers have found is that cognitive abilities are the ceiling of what a learner can attain. In other words, you might be highly motivated and have good resources, but without the cognitive abilities, you won’t be able to get as far as someone who is highly motivated, has good resources, and has strong working memory, good powers of associative memory, and strong implicit learning.
Over and over I have confronted the argument that aptitude and talent for language learning don’t matter, that cognitive endowments matter less than motivation, hard work, and discipline. These arguments are usually made by people who make money as language coaches or teachers. For them, acknowledging inborn, biologically-based individual variations among learners is bad for business. To make money, they must sell hope. They will starve trying to sell the reality that some will achieve more than others.
The egalitarian-minded don’t like talking about talented language learning because they find it dangerous to promote the idea of cognitive elites. Policymakers in the US and UK who want to promote foreign language learning don’t like it either, because they fear it gives their citizens an excuse not to learn languages.
But the science doesn’t support these positions. On one hand, executive function and working memory play huge roles in learning outcomes. How fast the brain processes information is important for learning and performance. All of these are inherited traits, by and large. You can’t improve them very much through practice, drugs, diet, or tricks. On the other hand, it’s true that everyone will improve from a baseline level if they spend enough time on a task. But it’s not true that everyone can achieve the same level of proficiency.
This confusion calls out for a new approach to learning, one that takes a scientifically-informed approach to helping people understand and talk about what learning is and how it happens. We need a way to talk that doesn’t invalidate either “nature” or “nurture” but allows us to talk about the interaction between those factors, along with others. The way to do this is to talk about language learning as weaving a rope.
Now, a rope is meant to be useful. And it’s composed of many strands (which are themselves composed of many smaller strands). Some of those strands are related to abilities that we’re born with—we all bring some strands to the task of weaving our language skills. Some strands we’re given. Other strands we get along the way. No matter what we start with, we all need opportunities to weave those strands together. In the end we have to weave these strands in order to make the rope usable, because no strand by itself is going to make the rope usable.
In the case of language skills, what are the strands? Each skill has social, emotional, and cognitive strands to it. Some of the cognitive strands are given because you’re born with them. These include working-memory capacity, brain processing speed, implicit learning (as I discussed above), acoustic sensitivities, and general factors involving the plasticity of the brain. These factors can’t be modified easily, and huge differences exist among individuals. Other cognitive strands can be enhanced, such as recognition abilities or knowledge about language. The social and emotional strands are things like dealing with boredom, staying focused on tasks, doing fun things, dealing with errors, dealing with social anxieties, and seeking out opportunities to use a new language.
This metaphor can be a great resource for teachers, who can use it to explain to students why they’re doing some activity or exercise. “Working on these verb conjugations might seem pointless, but it’s a strand in a rope you’re building about automaticity,” a teacher might say. “What you’re hearing there about those tones is a skill you’ll be able to weave into what you’ll need to practice about these tones,” another teacher might say.
Talking in terms of a rope also explains how different learners have different outcomes. “Don’t worry about that person – they must have really strong social strands in their skill ropes, that’s what makes them so willing to practice. Here: let’s work on weaving in some emotional skills that will get you to the same place.”
The rope metaphor helps explains the resources that learners need: they need material for the components of the rope and they need opportunities to weave (and reweave) their ropes. Learning is not a passive activity – the teacher doesn’t pour the knowledge into a learner’s empty brain. Rather, a good teacher gives learners opportunities to encounter the strands they’re given and weave them with the strands they already have, in pursuit of a useful, practical tool.
As many of the hyperpolyglots in Babel No More told me, counting the languages one speaks, reads, or knows – however one defines those activities – is a crude metric of the linguistic complexity one possesses in his or her brain, whether one is a polyglot or a monolingual. This is another reason to prefer the rope metaphor to talk about what hyperpolyglots can do: they’re people who are very good at weaving language skills and who have created many of them. It’s possible to weave many skill ropes and to discover that the strands that are good for one rope also serve to strengthen another. Some of the resulting skill ropes are so thick and powerful, they can tie ships to docks. Others are no wider than kite strings – but kites go play in the clouds. Hyperpolyglots make all sorts of ropes.
