Author: paige laevy

If you stroll down Green Lanes on a Saturday morning, you’ll still come across coffee shops where, if you stay long enough, you’ll hear it. It’s a mix of Greek and English that doesn’t quite belong to either language, spoken by older men and women in a way that sounds both entirely natural and slightly different from anything you’d hear in Nicosia or Athens. A bus turns into a páson. The store sells fish and chips. With its consonants softened and reshaped to conform to a phonological system never intended for English place names, Finsbury Park becomes Físpouri Ppak. The…

The most advanced language model ever created, trained on what amounts to a sizable portion of all human text ever digitized, is still unable to learn in the same way as a three-year-old, according to data that AI companies prefer not to publicly discuss. This data is being examined by a researcher in a language lab at the Max Planck Institute. The internet is not necessary for the child. She requires a kitchen, a dog, a caregiver, and roughly three years of gentle correction and pointing at objects. Almost everything that people have ever written down is required by the…

Journalists write the same story in forty languages in a room somewhere in the BBC’s offices, possibly in one of the more subdued hallways of the World Service building or Broadcasting House on Portland Place. Forty different editorial operations, each creating content for an audience that speaks, thinks, and debates in a language other than English, rather than forty translations of a single piece. Since the World Service started its foreign-language broadcasting in 1938 with an Arabic service targeted at the Middle East, the BBC has been doing this in a variety of ways. The organization has never been sure…

The tale of bilingual brains that we were told for years was almost too cute. The headlines claimed that speaking two languages would help you think more quickly, age more slowly, and possibly even avoid dementia. It was a great conversation topic for cocktails. Additionally, it presented language acquisition as a miracle cure, which is obviously untrue. The picture becomes more disorganized if you spend even a small amount of time doing the actual research. more fascinating as well. The book begins with a quote attributed to Charlemagne by Dr. Viorica Marian, a Northwestern professor who has spent decades researching…

Of all things, the mascot is enjoying a moment once more. Not the inflatable one waving outside a car dealership in Houston or Karachi, nor the dusty cereal-box kind, but a stranger species—a talkative, slightly insane, frequently bilingual creature that spends most of its time inside an app. You can see them on screens if you stroll through any airport lounge in Toronto or Mexico City: a potato with a backstory longer than most startup founders, an owl reprimanding someone in Spanish, and a gecko making a joke in English. The speed at which this change has occurred is difficult…

The waiter at a small café in Brussels takes your order in French, makes jokes with the cook in Dutch, and then switches to English as soon as a visitor enters. He acts without giving it any thought. It’s difficult to ignore how smoothly he switches between languages and how they flow through him like the weather when you watch him work. He once admitted to a regular that he hardly pays attention to the language he is speaking. It turns out that the brain sorts that out in a quiet way. FieldDetailSubjectThe Trilingual Brain — neurological and cognitive effects…

Before lunch, employees at a small café off Bermondsey Street alternate between four languages. The barista answers calls in Spanish, takes orders in English, jokes with the chef in Portuguese, and responds to a courier in Polish. Her payslip doesn’t reflect any of this. She doesn’t make a pound more from any of it than her English-speaking coworker. As this develops, it’s difficult to ignore the amount of unpaid, unrecorded linguistic labor that is quietly incorporated into the day. London’s multilingualism has long been a selling point. This is one of the ways the City markets itself to the world.…

Before the first patient is called, the geography of London’s language map becomes apparent when you walk through the line at any Whitechapel general practitioner’s office on a Monday morning. A grandmother wearing a navy headscarf mumbles a sentence. A young man moves his lips as he browses Google Translate. A receptionist makes gestures, smiles, and speaks a little more loudly, as though volume could take the place of vocabulary. It’s difficult to ignore how much of this city’s medical practice now occurs on the periphery of understanding. DetailInformationIssueShortage of bilingual GPs and interpreters in NHS primary careMost affected boroughsTower…

A few weeks ago, a clinic director in Houston informed one of my coworkers that she no longer posted job openings for monolingual therapists. Not because they weren’t necessary for her. Yes, she did. Too frequently, the response was “no,” “sort of,” or “only on Tuesdays,” to every intake call that came through her front desk. So she decided in silence. Even if it meant waiting months to fill a position, she would only employ bilingual clinicians going forward. More can be said about American mental healthcare from this little, telling moment than from any policy paper. Entering community clinics…

The bilingual reality of red-state America is immediately apparent when you drive past a strip mall in suburban Houston on a Tuesday afternoon, even before anyone speaks. Spanish-language signs above taquerias. A Vietnamese advertisement for a nail salon. A small church with an English and Korean marquee. Then, a few blocks away, an elementary school where you can learn nearly everything you need to know about the nation’s silent language war from the pickup line in the parking lot. Three or four languages are spoken by parents. English-speaking teachers waving. In the same way that water moves between rocks, children…