How Do Multilingual People Work? Groundbreaking New Research

Two years ago I participated in the first polyglot conference in Budapest. My goal was to show how conflict management could be a wonderful career choice for people who speak more than one language. A video of that speech was eventually published on Youtube.

Unresolved Business

Even though I got some really good feedback after that speech I couldn’t shake the idea that something was missing. What else could be done to help multilingual people find a good fit in the job market? What could I do to help more of them be happier and more successful at work? After talking this conundrum over with a friend of mine, he encouraged me to reach out and do something new. I’ve described this exciting project in the video below:

If you haven’t yet, please take a few minutes to participate in this important study.

Lots of Good Data

The first step is for us to get a real understanding of how bilingual and multilingual people are doing at work. We want to go beyond the personal experiences of one or two people—who work in one or two industries—and gather thousands of responses from all over the world. Not only is it important that you participate in the survey, it is also important that you encourage other bilingual and multilingual people to take the survey as well. Please share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and on any other social media where you have an account.

The more responses we get, the more accurate our information will be. The more accurate the information we get, the more we will learn about what works and what doesn’t for multilingual people in the work place. Our goal is to get really specific. What languages are best to learn in France? Which jobs do polyglots enjoy the most in Brazil? Are polyglots more valued in the USA than they are in Russia? We can’t answer these questions unless we get enough responses from people in all of those places. Please, please, take this survey and share it with every bilingual and multilingual person you know.

Who Should Not Take This Survey?

Please don’t mistake my enthusiasm for a lack of scientific rigor. We don’t want just anyone’s responses. If you are under the age of eighteen then, I’m sorry, but I’m not asking you to participate. If you have any significant work experience it was likely gained illegally.

If all the Spanish you know is a handful of phrases like ¿Dónde está el baño? then I’m not asking you to participate. If all the German you know is Guten Tag. and Wieviel kostet das? then I’m not asking for your responses either. We are looking for people who are at least functional bilinguals.

Who Should Take This Survey?

Functional and perfect do not mean the same thing at all. If you can have an unscripted conversation with someone in a foreign language, for more than five minutes, then please take this survey. It doesn’t matter to me that you can’t speak without making mistakes. As long as the other person can understand you and you can understand him/her then please take this survey.

There may be some people who are thinking, Well, I don’t exactly love my job so maybe I should not take this survey. Nothing could be farther than the truth. By all means, if you have a job that you love then please take this survey. If you have a job that you hate then please take this survey. If you have a job you think is just okay then please take this survey.

Others may say, Well, I don’t really use my languages much at work, maybe I shouldn’t take this survey. Wrong again! One of the things we want to see is how many people out there are bilingual/multilingual but don’t use their languages at work. Whether you use your languages every day, only occasionally, or not at all, please take this survey. Even if you are retired we want to know about your career as a bilingual/multilingual person.

It’s true that, in isolation, your responses might not be particularly helpful to people. When compared with the responses of thousands of other people from all over the world, your responses—no matter how obvious or boring they may seem to you—will be helpful. They will be helpful because they are part of a greater truth.

Great Answers to Great Questions

Studies have been done that show whether or not people who know two languages make more money than people who know only one. Studies have also been done to show if a bilingual French speaker makes more money than a bilingual German speaker. While nice, these studies leave us asking more questions.

Do they make more money because of their language skills or because those people happen to work in a more lucrative job? We don’t know. They might make more money but do they like their jobs more than people who only know one language? We don’t know.

Does knowing English, Japanese or Chinese really open doors for you in the job market or is it your university degree? Is it something else entirely? Are languages like Danish, Zulu and Hindi not really worth learning—for professional reasons—or do some people benefit greatly in their careers because they know a less popular language? If they do then why are they benefitting so much?

These are the kinds of questions we want to have good, solid answers for. We want to eventually publish a study—based on empirical data—that will help companies see the value of multilingual people. We want our study to provide the basis for good career advice to bilingual people and polyglots from all over the world.

All our study needs now is you. Please take a few minutes and participate in this survey.

English Comes from Turkey: Part II

Last month I wrote about a BBC article that describes a bold claim from Dr. Quentin Atkinson. This claim is that the Indoeuropean language (from which English and many other major word languages descended) came from modern day Turkey, not the Caucus region. The new theory is based on the results of a computer program that is normally used to show how related the DNA from different species is.

Evolving Species and Evolving Languages

Evolution is certainly a buzz word. It has a halo effect that seems to add  legitimacy to what a person says. Because of this people apply the word to situations that I often find strange. An actor’s career evolves even though it doesn’t give birth to new acting careers? Another tangible difference between the evolution of a career and the evolution of, say, chihuahuas, is that human beings have free will and the animals facing extinction did not.

Rob Schneider Has Free Will

Rob Schneider is an example of this. A successful comedic actor, when asked if he would consider a dramatic role, he replied, People don’t ask Andre Agassi, ‘You know you’re the No. 1 tennis player in the world … have you thought about polo?’ Rob’s career has faced the gamut of stimuli: everything from being extremely popular to almost forgotten. Through it all he sticks to comedy. Why? Choice. It’s true that outside factors are important. Some actors change out of perceived necessity and others change because they are famous and think they can get away with a different type of role. Though there are many outside factors there is one internal factor that can completely invalidate all others: free will. When it comes to human beings, their perception and interpretation of their experiences is much more important than the experiences themselves.

Croatian Does Not Want to Be Serbian

At the moment, Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible. Contrary to the trends of most other languages, Serbian and Croatian may no longer be mutually intelligible after 100 years or so. The reason for this is Croats are taking words of non-Slavic origin, inventing new replacement words of Slavic origin, and trying to phase the old words out. In Croatian the word for university is sveučilište. When you break down the different elements of the word it means the same thing as university (place of all knowledge/learning) but uses Slavic morphemes instead of Latin ones. The word in Serbian is yниверзитет (univerzitet). If the Croats continue this trend then their language will eventually cease to be understood by Serbs, Bosnians, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.

One could argue that this is evidence of linguistic evolution since Croats could feel threatened by the Serbian language. This argument has dubious merits but let’s consider it for a moment. Does it explain the way other mutually intelligible languages in similar circumstances have changed or not changed? Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are mutually intelligible but are not giving way to each other, in spite of Norway historically losing its statehood from time to time to the other two countries. Laotian, Isan and Thai are another example of mutually intelligible languages that have not made significant efforts to distinguish themselves in spite of conflict between their speakers.

What Makes the Difference?

People make the difference; their perceptions make the difference. Basque and Welsh should have disappeared long ago but they haven’t and probably won’t. Hebrew was resurrected from the dead! On the other hand, Dutch, Mongolian, German and Turkish were militarily and economically dominant languages that have left a proportionately tiny linguistic impact on the world. This is why I can’t accept a purely evolutionary explanation for a quintessentially human driven phenomenon. A physicist lives in a world of relative certainties; a psychologist does not. She may be able to predict with as much as 80% accuracy how different people will react to different things but, in the end, she will never know for sure. This theory that Indoeuropean came from Turkey may possibly be better than the one that claims that it came from the Caucuses. This, however, would only be so if the latter theory were slightly better than a wild guess.

English Comes from Turkey: Part I

This recent BBC article highlights the work of Kiwi researcher Dr. Quentin Atkinson on the origin of Indoeuropean. This is a language that we actually know very little about but many of the world’s major languages are derived from it (see the map below). The green countries mainly speak languages that descend from Indoeuropean, the neon green ones have an Indoeuropean language as their official language (or an official language) but actually have multilingual societies, and the turquoise ones have large minorities that speak an Indoeuropean language.

My friend Vlad (over at Forever a Student) has been attempting to learn Persian/Farsi. He speaks eleven languages, some of them with a near native level of mastery. Most of his languages are Indoeuropean: English, Italian, Slovak, French, Russian, German, Czech, Spanish, German and Portuguese. He also speaks two that are not Indoeuropean quite well (Mandarin Chinese and Hungarian). The man can’t help but be a philologist! Here are some examples of connections that he’s made between his different Indoeuropean languages and his newest Indoeuropean language: Persian.

Vlad:

Apart from the most obvious ones like bad (bad), tche (che), barâdar (brother), nou (new) and others, there are also a few mind blowing vocabulary relation to Slavic languages:
vopors – to ask (Rus vopros – question, Svk prosiť – to ask)

Zohré (Venus, Svk Zornička – Venus)

zohr – morning (Svk zore – morning red sky)

zan – woman (Svk žena – woman)

zemestân – winter (Svk zima – winter)

zamin – ground (Svk zem – ground)

Here’s a list of some other cognates I found so far:

Hast – there is, il y a, es gibt

Barâdar – brother

Markaz – market

Mâdar – mother

Dochtâr – doughter

Kelid – key

There are a lot of other cognates as well, but they are obviously much younger:

garson – boy

botri – bottle

taxi – taxi

All of these languages must have had a common source. We call that source Indoeuropean even though we have no idea who the Indoeuropeans were, what they actually called themselves or even exactly how their language worked. The modern language that is closest to the original Indoeuropean is supposed to be Lithuanian. What scientists have commonly suspected is that, after the wheel was invented, the Indoeuropeans left their home in the Caucuses (see below) and went all over the place.

Dr. Atkinson applied technology that shows the level of commonality in the DNA in different organisms to languages. This apparently was done with a huge data base of cognates. His results led him to believe that Indoeurpean does not come from the Caucuses but from Turkey.

What do you think of this idea? Do languages change the same way that organisms evolve?  Does it matter where Indoeuropean originated?

2nd Podcast: Language Liars

Click on the link below to listen to our latest podcast.

Language Liars

 

Calling a Spade a Spade

My favorite character in the children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes is the child who states the obvious. I suppose if that kid grew up and studied languages, s/he would ask why Serbs and Croats say they speak different languages even though they understand each other just fine and why Chinese is considered one language even though a ten-year-old from Hong Kong and a ten-year-old from Shanghai couldn’t communicate well enough to say who their favorite soccer players were and why.

Ever since I was introduced to the fact that the terms dialect and language had very weak definitions I have pondered on possibly better ways to address differences in speech. If all languages were as different as Cambodian and Turkish, or Japanese and Swahili, we would have no problems distinguishing between a dialect and a language. A dialect would be a variation of a language that all other speakers of that language could mostly, if not entirely, understand; a language would be considered different when the speakers of one group could not understand the speakers from another group.

These definitions have two major problems. One problem is that rulers have called mutually intelligible ways of speaking different languages to try and solidify their control and separate their subjects from others. They also do the reverse, calling mutually unintelligible ways of speaking the dialects of one national language for to solidify their control and unite different people who might not consider themselves unified. Over time these decisions have become ingrained in issues of national pride, religious unity, ethnicity, tradition, etc.

The second problem comes from dialect continua. In a nutshell, people living village A understand the people in village B just fine. People from village B and village C understand each other well but people from village A have a hard time communicating with village C and vice versa. People from village D understand people from village C quite well but have difficulty understanding villagers from B and can’t really understand the people from A. Examples of dialect continua include the varieties of Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, German and the main Scandinavian languages. The trouble is that everyone in the language group is understood by someone else but very few are understood by everyone.

I will be writing more about this fascinating subject in the future but for right now I would like to leave you with my basic proposal for changing how we call different linguistic varieties. My ideas are not fully fleshed out but I think they are a good start and I would appreciate your opinions about how to improve upon them. I would also like to clearly state right here that I am not interesting in the comments of naysayers. I don’t mind people disagreeing with certain points or, better yet, making helpful suggestions – even if I don’t end up agreeing with them – but I am not interested in hearing from those who think that this is a pointless or impossible endeavor.

My new approach to looking at linguistic varieties, as of now, is based on two principles and three definitions.

Definitions

1. Dialect – A spoken variety of which roughly 80% can be understood by the speakers of another dialect with little effort or less than a few days of constant exposure.
2. Sister Language – A spoken variety of which roughly 65% can be understood by the speakers of another sister language but that can be learned very quickly through systematic study or by a week to a month’s worth of constant exposure.
3. Language – A variety of speech that is less than 50% intelligible by speakers of other languages and cannot be learned without months or years of systematic study or constant exposure.

Principles

1. Perspective – The designation of dialect, sister language or language changes depending on the perspective of the speaker or groups of speakers.
2. Self-determination – While these new definitions would be very useful in academic or scientific settings no steps should be taken to force linguistic groups to conform or change the terms they use in everyday life or government.

I’ll end by referencing my very first post, which was about this subject.