Author: paige laevy

Although it probably ought to have done so months ago, a conversation is taking place in boardrooms, on Slack channels, and in anxious murmurs among developers. It hasn’t quite reached the general public yet. From the leaders of some of the most valuable companies in the world, the message is straightforward: either learn to work deeply with AI tools or you’ll find yourself outside a door that silently closed while you weren’t looking. It should have rattled most engineers out of complacency, according to Jensen Huang of Nvidia. “You’re not going to lose your job to an AI,” he stated,…

The same tried-and-true advice, “keep it simple, keep it one language,” can be found tucked away between growth charts and immunization schedules in practically every pediatrician’s waiting room in North America. For many years, parents of children growing up in bilingual homes were subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—warned that their children would become confused, their development would be slowed, or they would become stuck between two worlds and become fluent in neither. It’s a recurring notion with actual repercussions for actual families. As it happens, the science presents a very different picture. CategoryDetailsResearch InstitutionStanford University, Graduate School of EducationField of…

People who switch between languages on a daily basis experience an almost imperceptible change in their brains. It doesn’t appear on a resume, in a bottle of supplements, or in a morning regimen. However, researchers are starting to realize that the mental acrobatics required to be bilingual—that ongoing, unconscious control of two language systems—may be doing something subtly potent: shielding the mind from the gradual deterioration that contemporary life seems determined to bring about. Anyone who has endured a challenging period in a demanding job will tell you that burnout is more than just exhaustion. It is a form of…

If you stroll through the maternity ward of nearly any major hospital in London, such as Queen’s, the Royal Free, or King’s College, you’ll notice something that is rarely described in plain English in official reports. There are women waiting in beds, unable to adequately describe their emotions. They are viewed with genuine concern by midwives. And there is an unplanned silence in between the two. The NHS is currently losing an estimated £102 million annually as a result of that silence, which is multiplied by thousands of appointments, admissions, and emergency calls. It sounds like a bureaucratic number. The…

You’ll hear something that linguists find truly fascinating if you stroll through any Whitechapel street market on a Saturday morning. A grandmother uses Sylheti to call to her grandchild; the tonal rise in her voice is distinct, melodic, and rhythmically South Asian. With an accent that is halfway between East London and the classroom across the street, the child answers in English. However, if you pay more attention, you’ll notice an odd phenomenon. The rising lilt is also present in the grandmother’s English. When the grandchild’s Sylheti arrives, it lands where it should. Even though they belong to the same…

During a focus group in Sunnyvale, California, a Latina mother shared an unforgettable story. Because she was learning English as a young child, she recalled being dragged to the back of the classroom and kept apart from her peers while they read and engaged in lessons. She recalled the silent humiliation of it, the feeling of being cut off from something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. “I was so jealous,” she said. Her own child attends a public school decades later. Whether anything has truly changed is the question. Key Facts & Reference CategoryDetailTopic FocusMultilingual & bilingual education…

On any given Tuesday morning, you’ll notice something that takes some time to comprehend if you walk into a dual language elementary school in Brooklyn or Albuquerque. Spanish is used for half of the lesson. English is used in the other half. The kids switch between them with the ease of someone who has never been informed that this is supposed to be challenging. There isn’t any obvious confusion. Nobody appears to be lost. In contrast to what you’d see in a typical English-only classroom, where the pressure of standardized testing is written into every surface, the teacher moves through…

A comedian tells a joke in a language that didn’t exist thirty years ago on a Thursday night in a small comedy club in Hackney. The audience laughs right away, not because the joke is particularly clever, but because they can all identify the exact vocal register being used: the specific cadence, the dropped h, the Jamaican patois folded into South London vowels, and the Arabic term of address slipped in so effortlessly that it hardly registers. The comedian hasn’t changed his language. They’ve accomplished something more intriguing. They have spoken in a dialect that is not specific to any…

On a weekday morning, if you drive along the section of Sunset Boulevard that passes through East Los Angeles, you will hear English that is completely different from what you would hear in coastal Maine or suburban Boston. There are differences in the vowels. It has a different rhythm. Spanish words come and go with no apparent effort on the part of the speaker, and no one finds this noteworthy because it isn’t. People in that neighborhood have been talking in this manner for decades, and they will probably continue to talk more frequently in the future. The American accent…

A parent is being instructed to speak only English at home somewhere in a pediatrician’s office. Their two-and-a-half-year-old child speaks rich, natural, and full Mandarin, Spanish, or Tagalog, but the advice is given with quiet authority: stick to one language, lessen confusion, and give the child a better chance. Uncertain, the parent departs. Maybe guilty. When they get home, they begin to speak to their child differently, substituting a language that doesn’t come naturally to them for the one that does.For decades, this advice has been incorrect. The research has been inaccurate. The clinical presumption was incorrect. Thousands of bilingual…