This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox explore the benefits of speaking more than one language in the company of science writer Marek Kohn. Marek has recently published a book called Four Words for Friend, a reference to the fact that a Russian speaker has a choice of four different ways of indicating the degree of closeness he or she feels towards someone who in English would simply be referred to as a friend. This already indicates that learning a language is not simply a matter of memorising a set of one-to-one correspondences; there are nuances and subtleties to tune into. Different languages see the world differently, configure human interactions and relationships differently.
As a young child, Marek spoke his father’s native language, Polish, at home. But unlike many other writers on bilingualism, Marek does not, he readily admits, write from a position of complete and equal mastery of both languages. When he started school, English began to gain the upper hand, and Polish became what he calls ‘a slightly ghostly first language’. Not gone, not entirely forgotten, but edged out before it was deep-rooted.
And, perhaps counter-intuitively, this imperfect command of Polish makes him more rather than less interesting when he writes about the advantages of multilingualism. Because his is not a counsel of perfection, unattainable for most of us, but an advocacy of the real benefits that can come from exercising some knowledge of another language, be they educational, cognitive, economic, interpersonal or indeed intercommunal.
We tackle some of those big questions in the interview, but we began began by discussing that gear-shift from Polish to English that Marek experienced as a child.