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The Documentary: The Superlinguists: The polyglots

Superlinguists

02/07/2019 GMT

The polyglots

The Superlinguists

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Superlinguists, The polyglots

Meet the people who speak many languages. How do they do it, and why?

Simon Calder meets people who keep learning new languages not because they have to, but because they want to. What motivates them? Situations like this - an immigrant hotel cleaner who is moved to tears because you speak to her in her native Albanian; A Nepalese Sherpa family that rolls about laughing in disbelief at hearing their foreign guest speak Sherpa. But do polyglots have a different brain from the rest of us? Simon travels to a specialised lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and undergoes a brain-scan himself, to find out.

Presenter: Simon Calder
Producer: Arlene Gregorius

The Documentary: The Superlinguists

The people who speak many languages. How do they do it, and why?

Imagine speaking 10, 20, even 50 languages. Or living in a country where you have to speak three or four languages to get through your day. Simon Calder meets polyglots who love languages so much that they keep learning new ones. Could anyone do this? Simon gets the best tips for learning a new language. In multilingual countries – India and Luxembourg – people use several languages every day. How does that work? And do monolingual countries still exist?

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