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How Many Languages ​​Can a Child Speak?


If a newborn child grows up hearing people speaking many different languages, will he be able to speak all those languages ​​later on?

Puneesh T., India

Children learn languages ​​from the people around them. If exposed to more than one language, they may grow up to be bilingual or multilingual. Such environments are not unusual; The consensus among linguists is that the majority of children in the world grow up hearing more than one language.

But what if a child was brought up in an environment where he was exposed to tens or even hundreds of languages? We can imagine an Oliver Twist-type character growing up in some kind of hypothetical global train station, interacting with rotating station workers and visitors from all over the world. Could such a child be multilingual?

Probably not, says Suzy J. Styles, a developmental psychologist who studies language acquisition at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. One of the barriers is time: the more languages ​​you are exposed to, the less exposure you have to each. If you’re learning 365 languages ​​in a year, you can’t have more than one full day exposure to each.

Dr. Styles said that our script also leaves out something fundamental: what the child wants. Children are not just sponges that absorb everything around them. (If it were, mealtimes would be much easier.) They pay attention to the world and develop feelings and thoughts about the world, which plays a big role in their learning.

Dr. “Kids are motivated by watching others use their language together,” Styles said. “And they are often motivated to use the languages ​​they think have the greatest social impact.” If an ordinary passenger walks around the station speaking a foreign language and no one pays attention to them, the child probably won’t either. But if someone really cool shows up who speaks Icelandic or ancient Minoan and everyone turns to look, the kid will notice.

If people seem excited to talk to the newcomer, the child may get the impression that the language is cold and desirable to know. Children pay more attention to the speech of people they are interested in and want to imitate.

In other words, children need not only exposure but motivation to learn many languages. Dr. “One of the places that is particularly well known for its linguistic concentration is the highlands of Papua New Guinea,” Styles said, “where being able to communicate in several neighboring languages ​​is a huge social advantage.” In such situations, he said, children can learn to communicate fluently in a wide variety of languages.

Therefore, if you want to encourage a child to learn many languages, you need to expose them to many and make those languages ​​look attractive, even cool.

How did you do this? To be honest, I may not be the best person to ask. Despite my best efforts, “How to make something look cool to kids at school” is a skill I’ve never gotten used to.



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