Are You a Hyperpolyglot?

The Secrets of
Language Superlearners
The author of Babel No More explains what it takes to become super-multilingual.
By Katy Steinmetz @katysteinmetzJan. 30, 20125 Comments

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When God put the kibosh on the Tower of Babel, 72 languages were said to have been
created from the one that unified those hubristic humans. In his new book, Babel No More,
linguist Michael Erard seeks out the people who have put those pieces back together:
hyperpolyglots, i.e., the most fluent mamma-jammas on the planet. TIME spoke to Erard
about phenoms who can speak more languages than they have fingers, whether anyone can
do it and where the upper limits of human potential lie.
At what point does someone stop being a polyglot and start being a hyperpolyglot?
The hyperpolyglot is someone who is both a gifted and massive language accumulator.
They possess a particular neurology thats well-suited for learning languages very quickly
and being able to use them. When I started the project, I was using the number of six [as a
cutoff] because there was a survey of multilingual communities around the world, and the
maximum used in any one community was five. So ordinary people, who dont have any
special mental gifts or access to education, can speak five. In my work, I did a survey and
many people said they could speak six or seven, but they started to fall off at 11. So I
suggest that number.
How widespread are these language superlearners?
Theyre rare. But my argument is that were going to see more and more of them because
of the way the world is now. You can travel very easily. Just looking at my Twitter feed, I
see Greek and Chinese and Spanish and Korean. All of these languages are in front of us in
a way that they didnt used to be. That, along with globalization in general, is creating
environments that are giving people who have those brains an opportunity to pursue those
languages.
What about their brains makes them so suited to picking up languages?
Those who have looked at those foreign language-learning talents suggest that these people
have good memories, that they encode things in long-term memory and can retrieve it
quickly. And that those things in memory dont decay quickly. There are suggestions that
people with the ability to mimic pronunciation have brains that are anatomically different
and work more efficiently in areas related to processing and producing speech sounds
[But] theres a lot that has to happen. These people are not born. And theyre not made.
Theyre born to be made.
Beyond brains, are there other traits that hyperpolyglots typically share?
If somebody were to come up to me and say, I know somebody who speaks 15 languages, I
would say, If you told me that person was left-handed, I wouldnt be surprised. If you told
me that person didnt drive a car and got lost very easily, that wouldnt surprise me. If you
told me they were male, that wouldnt surprise me. If you told me this person was
[introverted, pragmatic and independent], that wouldnt surprise me either. The other part
that is potentially controversial is the link with homosexuality. If they told me that person
was gay, that wouldnt surprise me either.
Whats their secret for learning, assuming these other factors are in place?
They know how they learn, so they dont waste time with methods that dont work for
them. An example would be knowing that social interaction is a problem and saying, Im
going to spend time with texts. Or vice versa. One thing hyperpolyglots do that the rest
of us could do is [utilize their resources]. You could find out where in the U.S. there are
very high concentrations of native speakers of French or German. You dont need to go to
the Philippines to learn Tagalog. You just need to go to Los Angeles, or wherever it is.
How much does having a youthful brain matter when learning languages?
Another thing that distinguishes hyperpolyglots is that they dont give up. They adjust their
methods as they get older. But clearly its very early learning that gives them the
advantage. With Cardinal Mezzofanti [a famous Italian hyperpolyglot], there are arguments
about how many languages he actually used and to what level he could use them. Two
gentlemen scholars of the 19th century both agreed that he mastered 30 languages. In
Mezzofantis case, those were the languages he had learned by the time he was in his mid-
20s.
Can anyone be a hyperpolyglot?
I dont think so. Certainly there are people who are just ordinary folks who can speak two
languages, or three or four. But once you start to get over five, theres diminishing social
returns. Foreign-language teachers dont want to hear me say that not everyone can become
a hyperpolyglot, but certainly everyone can learn another language, which is a much more
reasonable goal In the book, I wanted to get language-learning out of the self and into
the brain. Its not will and motivation that determines your success. Thats part of it, but its
also about what your brain is capable of doing and set up to do. Hyperpolyglots have been
thought of as just eccentric people with an interesting hobby. But theres more to them than
that.
What are the drawbacks to being a hyperpolyglot?
The hyperpolyglots who are the happiest are the ones who have found a social niche where
being massively multilingual is not freaky, where its encouraged and you have positive
social feedback, like [one of the subjects in my book who] is a translator for the European
Union Other people get stuck in environments where language-learning is not prized at
all, and they get labeled as dilettantes. Nobody understands them. From an American
perspective, were always being told that we have to speak more languages, because thats
the avenue to employment and success, but for some of these guys, it just doesnt have that
same payoff. Speaking 25 languages doesnt make you vastly wealthy. In part because you
have to spend a lot of time doing it, and it doesnt leave a lot of time for the things that lead
to success in our world: the social networking, other sorts of degrees.
Should we expect todays average person to speak more than one language?
What is a pity is that people dont attempt to have as complex as linguistic system as they
can get. Even if your only language is English, that you dont expand your vocabulary, that
you dont read, that you dont listen to other accents, that you dont understand even
English in all of its variations. You can get more complexity by going into other languages
or your own language. For me its a question of cognitive capital. Everyone has potential.
What does it really mean to speak or know a language?
In industrialized countries, institutions have taken control of what it means to speak a
language and have set out to measure that, and set the bar pretty high. It requires literacy, as
well as experience with the culture and education to perform well on these tests
whereas there are parts of the world, like South India, where they dont need to have an
institution certify their abilities. Their abilities are certified by who they are and their use of
the languages.
What are the upper limits of the humans ability to learn languages?
The person who I consider to be the most lingual person in the world, currently living, is
the guy who won the Polyglot of Europe contest in 1990: Derick Herning. Hes a Scottish
organist, and he lives in the Shetland Islands. He was given points for having some ability
to communicate in 22 languages After the contest, he continued to learn languages. Now
he says he has 31, though the ones hes able to use on a regular basis without any warming
up are 10 or 11.
I s he maxing out human potential?
I think the limit is there. [Characters] from the 19th century are regularly attributed with
more than 100 languages, without a problem. You wonder, Were they just smarter back
then? I think its because the standards for what counts as [speaking] a language have
gotten harder.
The inevitable question: how many languages do you speak?
I really only speak one: English. But if I were warmed up, I could talk a certain amount of
Spanish or Mandarin. I call myself a monolingual with benefits.

Read more: Are You a Hyperpolyglot? The Secrets of Language Superlearners | TIME.com
http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/30/are-you-a-hyperpolyglot-the-secrets-of-language-
superlearners/#ixzz2l9EZphZW