Author: paige laevy

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…

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.…