[Music]
[Applause]
the majority of the world’s population
actually uses more than one language to
communicate many people grow up with two
languages but the majority of
multilingual –zz acquire the languages
are various times in their lives many
people learn language to open doors to
education business diplomacy many other
professional spheres many people learn
languages to know enough so they can
introduce themselves order a steak ask
for directions when there are broads and
a lot of people fall into the Loren
category I will fail you for this test
which means you will get an F for the
entire module sweep overhead
well like Lauren billions of us learn a
language because we have to I fall into
the Lauren category I learned how to
read and write in English before I could
do so in my native language Greek and
the reason for that is that my parents
run a foreign language school in Greece
here it is
the athanasopoulou foreign language
school and that’s a cute picture of me
and my siblings all proud alumni of the
school I will look very cute there but
my dad will tell you that we were right
terrors in the classroom we’re like
Lauren
we weren’t bothered but thinking about
it and studying the subject they’re not
doing research of it I’ve come to
realize that actually Lauren isn’t just
mixing up a languages for the sake of it
she isn’t confused she’s trying to
achieve maximum communicative effects
notice how she pronounced bovered
in the French sentence and how her
pronunciation and pitch for the same
word changed to English milliseconds
later Lauren is living life in high
definition like millions of second
language users she adapts her behavior
she combines her languages to make her
point to her French teacher yes she
knows enough French to pass the oral
exam and no she ain’t bothered so using
another language isn’t just mindless
translation from your first language you
actually enter into a new mode of
thinking a bilingual mode and that’s
because languages aren’t just different
codes for the same meanings the embodied
different world views different ways to
see the world and in this respect the
language works very much like vision so
how does vision work
here’s another childhood reminisce the
movie Wayne’s World I grew up with that
movie loved it couldn’t resist the
opportunity to play a clip here
here’s Wayne to explain us how vision
works
camera one camera two camera one camera
two camera one camera two camera one
camera two camera two tell me when that
first show is over will you still love
me when I’m an incredibly humongo a
giant star you know how to get a punch
line in right so draw this at home your
better half it’s a lot of fun I can tell
you but Wayne discovers here the
benefits of binocular vision we don’t
actually need two eyes to see a one will
do the job but see with two eyes instead
of one expands your visual field it
allows you to see in 3d so then you’re
better able to judge the distance and
size of objects and this is because each
eye sees the world from a different
angle creating slightly different
picture and that the brain takes these
pictures combines them into a single
three-dimensional image language works
very much the same way just like each
eye presents a unique image to the brain
so that each of the world’s languages
present the unique world view to the
mind some upon two days this using more
than one language expands your mind just
like seeing with two eyes expands your
vision
color is a classic demonstration of this
so we’re used to a variety of
standardized color terms in our
industrialized societies but in fact
many of the world’s languages have only
two terms dark and light the majority of
the world’s languages have five basic
terms including a GRU term to refer to
what English speakers would call green
and blue and many languages make even
finer distinctions than English so for
example they distinguish between
different shades of blue like Greek does
so the darker shade is called Blair the
lighter shade is called hell Azure and
if you’re describing a picture in Greek
you rarely mix those terms up the
difference between them is as
fundamental as a difference between
green and blue for a speaker of English
so we asked English monolinguals to
point to the best example of blue on a
color chart like this one that has tens
of examples and then we asked Greek
monolinguals to do the same for the
translation equivalent of blue which is
black and the two groups spawned two
completely different examples and then
we asked Greek English bilinguals to do
this and the mind combine the two
concepts into one they picked the color
that was in between the two monolingual
examples just like the brain combines
the two images that come from the eyes
into one picture but integrating
multiple perspectives can go as far as
helping us overcome some deeply rooted
stereotypes one of those is gender now
despite our best efforts no matter how
hard we try to avoid gender stereotypes
they unconsciously creep up into our
activity it’s the way we’re socialized
the way that would be body with this by
the media and so on the one who brought
up sometimes
this is reflected in the language
examples I’m using here so shopping is
typically associated with women but
guitar playing is something that men
usually do in fact gender is so
entrenched in the way that we operate
that almost all of the world’s languages
have words that refer to gender so
English has what we linguists call
semantic or natural gender and what you
do is you use different words like she
he has in his to refer to the entities
biological gender where that is obvious
when we talk about animates reference
but there are many other languages like
Spanish French German and Greek who also
marked gender for non living things like
toasters and guitars and tables and so
on
anybody who’s attempted to learn French
or Spanish at school knows what
difficult this is to learn every now and
every word referring to that noun takes
a different ending to mark the object’s
gender now this kind of gender is called
grammatical gender and grammatical
gender is almost entirely arbitrary
there’s nothing to indicate that
biologically a toaster should be male or
female and that’s
so difficult to learn well it turns out
that if you are a bilingual in a
grammatical gender language like French
and a natural gender language like
English that helps you to get rid of
these deeply rooted stereotypical biases
relating to gender
so we asked Englishmen or link walls to
describe a face that is gender-neutral
and we presented the face in the context
of things that are associated with
female stereotype like an apron and a
necklace and the adjectives that they
assigned to the face were things like
charming and caring which are considered
to be female stereotypes stereotypical
traits the one who showed the same face
the same people this time in the context
of things that are associated with men
like an axe and a power drill they tend
to describe the face as muscular and
realistic which are males Thera typical
traits but we showed that face to
french-english bilinguals they weren’t
affected by these stereotypes at all
they were just as likely to describe the
face as caring Orion istic regardless of
the stereotypical context so for them
it’s as if these conventional
stereotypical associations don’t exist
at all it’s like one language holds a
mirror up to the other language it helps
you pull out some kind of monolingual
matrix and coming out of the monolingual
matrix can affect also our deepest north
and conscious experiences like the
passage of time time is something that
really fascinates me because time is
very abstract but what kind of touch to
say but we’re really obsessed with time
so I have a counter in front of me that
tells me that my talk has to be over in
11 minutes and 35 seconds but for all
strictness time is very very cool
because the way that we actually
experience it inside of us very much
depends on our imagination and on our
language so speakers of different
languages have distinct ways
of visualizing time in their mind
English and Swedish speakers picture
time in the minds as a horizontal line
as distance traveled a long amount of
time but on the other hand speakers of
Spanish and Greek picture it as quantity
as volume taking up three-dimensional
space a big amount of time this affects
how people unconsciously estimate time
so when we show to English speakers
lines drawing on the screen and we are
interesting me at the time that
influenced by how long the line grows
that longer the line grows the more time
they think has passed in their mind and
will get this effect with Spanish and
Greek speakers when we show them
containers filling up with liquid the
more liquid that goes in the container
the more time they think has passed but
bilinguals flexible so when we prompt
them with a Swedish word for duration
they actually estimate time at the
Swedish frame when we prompt the Swedish
Spanish bilinguals with the word for
duration in Spanish then they’re
influenced by the Spanish way doing it
by container volume and they do this
this is within the same individual very
very quickly within the same experiment
again milliseconds between the two
languages it’s not unlike the recent
film arrival with Amy Adams so Amy Adams
in arrival she plays a linguist who’s
trying to decipher an alien language
and here comes the spoiler alert for
those of you who haven’t seen the movie
the way that the aliens talk about time
in their language gives them the super
power that they can see into the future
and so as amy adams learns their
language gradually she also develops
this ability to look ahead now unlike
hollywood’s we’re not claiming in our
lab that bilinguals can see the future
we can’t against but actually learning a
new way to talk about time does rewire
your brain it does something to your
sense of
time and this kind of fact not only
individuals but entire societies let’s
turn in to one of the foremost
preoccupations of the modern world money
okay well so here’s a graph showing you
countries belonging to the OECD
and what you see here are the savings
rates that of each country expressed as
a percentage of gross domestic product
that is plotted on the vertical axis now
what’s very clear from this graph is
that there is a lot of variation some
countries save more of their GDP than
others now these are all Western
democratic that’s realized societies so
why is it so much variation the proposal
by behavioral economist Keith Chen is
that it’s all down to how this language
the languages spoken in these countries
separate the present from the future
so in countries clustered towards the
right side of the graph those that have
more trouble saving money
they are so-called future languages the
Forster speakers to say different things
depending on whether an event is
happening now versus happening in the
future
so in Greek you say i dinner with a
friend now and i will it dinner with a
friend tomorrow and the english is very
similar in that respect you say it’s
raining now and it will rain tomorrow
the point is that the verb changes
there’s a linguistic barrier between the
present and the future the mix the
future see more distant more
disconnected from the present so we
don’t unless you tend to worry less
about the future if you speak one of
these languages but the language is
spoken in countries closer to the left
side of the graph those are the wealth
in their savings make no such demand
from their speakers there’s talk of
futureless languages so in swedish the
futureless language you say i didn’t
with a friend now and i dinner with a
friend
tomorrow the verb stays the same so this
identical way of talking about the
present in the future leads you to also
feel about them identically and that
lead you to take more action in the
present that has
secuence is for your future but a few
countries in chance graph are actually
bi or multilingual if there’s a link
between language structure and your
ability to save could there also be a
link between bilingualism and future
saving strategies so I took out
Luxembourg Switzerland and Belgium from
this graph all countries with a
multilingual population who crucially
speak a mixture of future and futureless
languages and are recalculating the GDP
averages so this time I’m comparing
three groups monolingual featured
speakers versus monolingual futureless
speakers versus multilingual countries
part that emerges is striking there’s a
clear economic advantage for
multilingual countries what the
difference between futureless and
featured countries all but disappears
it’s a little bit like the gender
example I showed earlier it’s as if one
language holds a mirror up to the other
having these two contrasting ways of
separating the present from you the
future in your language repertoire helps
you break free from the constraints of
your native language well we need to
verify this in the laboratory at the
individual level look at people’s brains
to see what’s really going on in the
meantime if you want to save more money
might not be a good a bad idea to learn
Swedish or Japanese for that matter if
you want to experience different shades
of blue learn Greek if you want to break
free from gender stereotypes learn
French or German you want to experience
time differently like Amy Adams learn
Spanish or Swedish the point is that in
this new light learning and using a
second language is like having a
superpower it allows you to become a
mind reader almost you can understand
and anticipate the behavior of others
and like Lauren does at the beginning of
my talk adapt your behavior to achieve
what you want and in fact the payoff is
far bigger than we ever imagined because
language learning is difficult okay this
is no myth it’s pretty hard especially
if you’re an adult learning requires
cognitive efforts monitoring
conversational situation the language
context switch between these different
perspectives all these things take
mental effort even if it’s unconscious
but this is precisely why I would
strongly urge you to learn languages
because putting in all that mental
effort is like sending your brain to the
gym and the data from medical records is
telling in countries as diverse as
Israel Canada India and closer to home
Scotland the number of languages you
know correlates with better protection
against cognitive decline in old age
what delinquents actually get an average
of five years more of healthy brain than
monolinguals will delay the onset of
Alzheimer’s and dementia and this is
regardless of education level and some
studies show regardless of when in life
you started learning your languages and
the really cool thing is that we don’t
even have to learn your language at the
super proficient level that’s like you
don’t go to the gym to get a body like
arnie so a little goes a long way here
as long as you use more than one
language in your everyday life you are
firing up your neurons keeping your
brain in good shape well having only one
language allows you to get by just fine
don’t get me wrong just like having one
eye allows you to see you can adequately
communicate with others function well in
your job even get by in many parts of
the world but speak your language but
just like seeing with two eyes allows
you to see in high-definition
speaking using two three or more
languages opens up new dimensions in
your thinking in your outlook in your
everyday behavior this allows you to
live life in high definition so let us
not have strict ourselves to only one
language one worldview modern medicine
has made it possible for us to live
longer learning languages can give us
better quality of life as well it’s
never too late to start thank you
[Applause]
[Applause]
the majority of the world’s population
actually uses more than one language to
communicate many people grow up with two
languages but the majority of
multilingual –zz acquire the languages
are various times in their lives many
people learn language to open doors to
education business diplomacy many other
professional spheres many people learn
languages to know enough so they can
introduce themselves order a steak ask
for directions when there are broads and
a lot of people fall into the Loren
category I will fail you for this test
which means you will get an F for the
entire module sweep overhead
well like Lauren billions of us learn a
language because we have to I fall into
the Lauren category I learned how to
read and write in English before I could
do so in my native language Greek and
the reason for that is that my parents
run a foreign language school in Greece
here it is
the athanasopoulou foreign language
school and that’s a cute picture of me
and my siblings all proud alumni of the
school I will look very cute there but
my dad will tell you that we were right
terrors in the classroom we’re like
Lauren
we weren’t bothered but thinking about
it and studying the subject they’re not
doing research of it I’ve come to
realize that actually Lauren isn’t just
mixing up a languages for the sake of it
she isn’t confused she’s trying to
achieve maximum communicative effects
notice how she pronounced bovered
in the French sentence and how her
pronunciation and pitch for the same
word changed to English milliseconds
later Lauren is living life in high
definition like millions of second
language users she adapts her behavior
she combines her languages to make her
point to her French teacher yes she
knows enough French to pass the oral
exam and no she ain’t bothered so using
another language isn’t just mindless
translation from your first language you
actually enter into a new mode of
thinking a bilingual mode and that’s
because languages aren’t just different
codes for the same meanings the embodied
different world views different ways to
see the world and in this respect the
language works very much like vision so
how does vision work
here’s another childhood reminisce the
movie Wayne’s World I grew up with that
movie loved it couldn’t resist the
opportunity to play a clip here
here’s Wayne to explain us how vision
works
camera one camera two camera one camera
two camera one camera two camera one
camera two camera two tell me when that
first show is over will you still love
me when I’m an incredibly humongo a
giant star you know how to get a punch
line in right so draw this at home your
better half it’s a lot of fun I can tell
you but Wayne discovers here the
benefits of binocular vision we don’t
actually need two eyes to see a one will
do the job but see with two eyes instead
of one expands your visual field it
allows you to see in 3d so then you’re
better able to judge the distance and
size of objects and this is because each
eye sees the world from a different
angle creating slightly different
picture and that the brain takes these
pictures combines them into a single
three-dimensional image language works
very much the same way just like each
eye presents a unique image to the brain
so that each of the world’s languages
present the unique world view to the
mind some upon two days this using more
than one language expands your mind just
like seeing with two eyes expands your
vision
color is a classic demonstration of this
so we’re used to a variety of
standardized color terms in our
industrialized societies but in fact
many of the world’s languages have only
two terms dark and light the majority of
the world’s languages have five basic
terms including a GRU term to refer to
what English speakers would call green
and blue and many languages make even
finer distinctions than English so for
example they distinguish between
different shades of blue like Greek does
so the darker shade is called Blair the
lighter shade is called hell Azure and
if you’re describing a picture in Greek
you rarely mix those terms up the
difference between them is as
fundamental as a difference between
green and blue for a speaker of English
so we asked English monolinguals to
point to the best example of blue on a
color chart like this one that has tens
of examples and then we asked Greek
monolinguals to do the same for the
translation equivalent of blue which is
black and the two groups spawned two
completely different examples and then
we asked Greek English bilinguals to do
this and the mind combine the two
concepts into one they picked the color
that was in between the two monolingual
examples just like the brain combines
the two images that come from the eyes
into one picture but integrating
multiple perspectives can go as far as
helping us overcome some deeply rooted
stereotypes one of those is gender now
despite our best efforts no matter how
hard we try to avoid gender stereotypes
they unconsciously creep up into our
activity it’s the way we’re socialized
the way that would be body with this by
the media and so on the one who brought
up sometimes
this is reflected in the language
examples I’m using here so shopping is
typically associated with women but
guitar playing is something that men
usually do in fact gender is so
entrenched in the way that we operate
that almost all of the world’s languages
have words that refer to gender so
English has what we linguists call
semantic or natural gender and what you
do is you use different words like she
he has in his to refer to the entities
biological gender where that is obvious
when we talk about animates reference
but there are many other languages like
Spanish French German and Greek who also
marked gender for non living things like
toasters and guitars and tables and so
on
anybody who’s attempted to learn French
or Spanish at school knows what
difficult this is to learn every now and
every word referring to that noun takes
a different ending to mark the object’s
gender now this kind of gender is called
grammatical gender and grammatical
gender is almost entirely arbitrary
there’s nothing to indicate that
biologically a toaster should be male or
female and that’s
so difficult to learn well it turns out
that if you are a bilingual in a
grammatical gender language like French
and a natural gender language like
English that helps you to get rid of
these deeply rooted stereotypical biases
relating to gender
so we asked Englishmen or link walls to
describe a face that is gender-neutral
and we presented the face in the context
of things that are associated with
female stereotype like an apron and a
necklace and the adjectives that they
assigned to the face were things like
charming and caring which are considered
to be female stereotypes stereotypical
traits the one who showed the same face
the same people this time in the context
of things that are associated with men
like an axe and a power drill they tend
to describe the face as muscular and
realistic which are males Thera typical
traits but we showed that face to
french-english bilinguals they weren’t
affected by these stereotypes at all
they were just as likely to describe the
face as caring Orion istic regardless of
the stereotypical context so for them
it’s as if these conventional
stereotypical associations don’t exist
at all it’s like one language holds a
mirror up to the other language it helps
you pull out some kind of monolingual
matrix and coming out of the monolingual
matrix can affect also our deepest north
and conscious experiences like the
passage of time time is something that
really fascinates me because time is
very abstract but what kind of touch to
say but we’re really obsessed with time
so I have a counter in front of me that
tells me that my talk has to be over in
11 minutes and 35 seconds but for all
strictness time is very very cool
because the way that we actually
experience it inside of us very much
depends on our imagination and on our
language so speakers of different
languages have distinct ways
of visualizing time in their mind
English and Swedish speakers picture
time in the minds as a horizontal line
as distance traveled a long amount of
time but on the other hand speakers of
Spanish and Greek picture it as quantity
as volume taking up three-dimensional
space a big amount of time this affects
how people unconsciously estimate time
so when we show to English speakers
lines drawing on the screen and we are
interesting me at the time that
influenced by how long the line grows
that longer the line grows the more time
they think has passed in their mind and
will get this effect with Spanish and
Greek speakers when we show them
containers filling up with liquid the
more liquid that goes in the container
the more time they think has passed but
bilinguals flexible so when we prompt
them with a Swedish word for duration
they actually estimate time at the
Swedish frame when we prompt the Swedish
Spanish bilinguals with the word for
duration in Spanish then they’re
influenced by the Spanish way doing it
by container volume and they do this
this is within the same individual very
very quickly within the same experiment
again milliseconds between the two
languages it’s not unlike the recent
film arrival with Amy Adams so Amy Adams
in arrival she plays a linguist who’s
trying to decipher an alien language
and here comes the spoiler alert for
those of you who haven’t seen the movie
the way that the aliens talk about time
in their language gives them the super
power that they can see into the future
and so as amy adams learns their
language gradually she also develops
this ability to look ahead now unlike
hollywood’s we’re not claiming in our
lab that bilinguals can see the future
we can’t against but actually learning a
new way to talk about time does rewire
your brain it does something to your
sense of
time and this kind of fact not only
individuals but entire societies let’s
turn in to one of the foremost
preoccupations of the modern world money
okay well so here’s a graph showing you
countries belonging to the OECD
and what you see here are the savings
rates that of each country expressed as
a percentage of gross domestic product
that is plotted on the vertical axis now
what’s very clear from this graph is
that there is a lot of variation some
countries save more of their GDP than
others now these are all Western
democratic that’s realized societies so
why is it so much variation the proposal
by behavioral economist Keith Chen is
that it’s all down to how this language
the languages spoken in these countries
separate the present from the future
so in countries clustered towards the
right side of the graph those that have
more trouble saving money
they are so-called future languages the
Forster speakers to say different things
depending on whether an event is
happening now versus happening in the
future
so in Greek you say i dinner with a
friend now and i will it dinner with a
friend tomorrow and the english is very
similar in that respect you say it’s
raining now and it will rain tomorrow
the point is that the verb changes
there’s a linguistic barrier between the
present and the future the mix the
future see more distant more
disconnected from the present so we
don’t unless you tend to worry less
about the future if you speak one of
these languages but the language is
spoken in countries closer to the left
side of the graph those are the wealth
in their savings make no such demand
from their speakers there’s talk of
futureless languages so in swedish the
futureless language you say i didn’t
with a friend now and i dinner with a
friend
tomorrow the verb stays the same so this
identical way of talking about the
present in the future leads you to also
feel about them identically and that
lead you to take more action in the
present that has
secuence is for your future but a few
countries in chance graph are actually
bi or multilingual if there’s a link
between language structure and your
ability to save could there also be a
link between bilingualism and future
saving strategies so I took out
Luxembourg Switzerland and Belgium from
this graph all countries with a
multilingual population who crucially
speak a mixture of future and futureless
languages and are recalculating the GDP
averages so this time I’m comparing
three groups monolingual featured
speakers versus monolingual futureless
speakers versus multilingual countries
part that emerges is striking there’s a
clear economic advantage for
multilingual countries what the
difference between futureless and
featured countries all but disappears
it’s a little bit like the gender
example I showed earlier it’s as if one
language holds a mirror up to the other
having these two contrasting ways of
separating the present from you the
future in your language repertoire helps
you break free from the constraints of
your native language well we need to
verify this in the laboratory at the
individual level look at people’s brains
to see what’s really going on in the
meantime if you want to save more money
might not be a good a bad idea to learn
Swedish or Japanese for that matter if
you want to experience different shades
of blue learn Greek if you want to break
free from gender stereotypes learn
French or German you want to experience
time differently like Amy Adams learn
Spanish or Swedish the point is that in
this new light learning and using a
second language is like having a
superpower it allows you to become a
mind reader almost you can understand
and anticipate the behavior of others
and like Lauren does at the beginning of
my talk adapt your behavior to achieve
what you want and in fact the payoff is
far bigger than we ever imagined because
language learning is difficult okay this
is no myth it’s pretty hard especially
if you’re an adult learning requires
cognitive efforts monitoring
conversational situation the language
context switch between these different
perspectives all these things take
mental effort even if it’s unconscious
but this is precisely why I would
strongly urge you to learn languages
because putting in all that mental
effort is like sending your brain to the
gym and the data from medical records is
telling in countries as diverse as
Israel Canada India and closer to home
Scotland the number of languages you
know correlates with better protection
against cognitive decline in old age
what delinquents actually get an average
of five years more of healthy brain than
monolinguals will delay the onset of
Alzheimer’s and dementia and this is
regardless of education level and some
studies show regardless of when in life
you started learning your languages and
the really cool thing is that we don’t
even have to learn your language at the
super proficient level that’s like you
don’t go to the gym to get a body like
arnie so a little goes a long way here
as long as you use more than one
language in your everyday life you are
firing up your neurons keeping your
brain in good shape well having only one
language allows you to get by just fine
don’t get me wrong just like having one
eye allows you to see you can adequately
communicate with others function well in
your job even get by in many parts of
the world but speak your language but
just like seeing with two eyes allows
you to see in high-definition
speaking using two three or more
languages opens up new dimensions in
your thinking in your outlook in your
everyday behavior this allows you to
live life in high definition so let us
not have strict ourselves to only one
language one worldview modern medicine
has made it possible for us to live
longer learning languages can give us
better quality of life as well it’s
never too late to start thank you
[Applause]
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