Is speaking multiple languages a Strength or Weakness in 2024?

My POV: The Benefits of speaking multiple languages will diminish by 2050. AI will make communications easier despite language barriers.

Historically, being a polyglot was/is seen as a sign of intelligence. Will the next generations continue to see it that way? Back in the 1990s when landlines were new, we had an uncle who could remember phone numbers, and we would call him to find out the number and of course, he was considered smart. In my teenage and handsome years, I was considered smart for knowing routes and directions. Google Maps took all my smartness away. As a logical extension of my experience, I do not believe language as a barrier to communication will shudder. 

With advances in artificial intelligence and machine translation, it’s easy to wonder whether language learning still makes sense.

 

Maintaining a language is hard work. Maintaining multiple languages is a lot of hard work. #notscalable

Languages are enormously dependent on fluency, but fluency is the first thing that degrades if you aren’t using a language—even after intensive practice. Extensive practice over decades can help with this, as can intensive practice on high-frequency words. But the tip-of-the-tongue feeling that is an infrequent nuisance for native speakers becomes a constant frustration if you don’t practice regularly.

Maintaining multiple languages has all the difficulties of preserving each language on its own and adding the problem of interference.

To oversimplify, language learning is largely a process of building associations between an intended meaning and a linguistic form that communicates that meaning. But one of the most well-studied phenomena in memory research is that when you associate one input with two different responses (for example, apple is both “pomme” and “manzana”), it creates a lot of interference. Interference tends to be more severe with speaking and writing than with listening or reading because language → meaning is a consistent mapping, whereas meaning → language varies depending on which language you’re trying to produce. Interference can be overcome through regular practice that alternates between languages. However, this type of practice significantly increases workload.

 

 

Lower proficiency is less valuable in non-immersive contexts.

All else being equal, the same amount of time split among several languages will result in a lower proficiency than if that time was invested in one.

This means that the choice isn’t usually between speaking one language perfectly or several languages perfectly; it’s between speaking one language better or multiple languages worse. My desire to learn multiple languages has definitely drained energy I could have spent mastering just one.

An observation I quickly made after my language learning trips was that while speaking the local language was beneficial at almost any level of ability, speaking a foreign language had limited uses at lower ability levels. The reason is simple: if you live in an English-speaking country, almost everyone knows some English, so to communicate with someone in a different language requires you to speak that language much better than they can speak English.¹

This observation applies to more than just conversational ability. While living in Spain, being able to read menus and printed instructions in Spanish (which requires a fairly low level of fluency) is enormously useful. In contrast, outside of Spain, the situations that benefit from understanding Spanish are things like reading literature or watching international news clips—things that require a much higher level of ability to appreciate.

Now, the division of effort doesn’t imply that the division of proficiency is equal. You need to learn a relatively small set of words to move from not knowing a language to having simple conversations, but to move from intermediate to advanced levels of a language means massively expanding your vocabulary. How often words are used falls off in frequency according to a power law—with common words being used very frequently and less common words being used barely at all—but the effort needed to learn words is basically flat. Thus, going from intermediate to advanced levels of a language is much harder than getting to simple conversations from scratch.

That distinction notwithstanding, if you’re not planning on traveling frequently, knowing multiple languages is less useful at home than being more proficient in a single language.

 

Multiple languages make cohesive social networks harder.

All else being equal, the same amount of time split among several languages will result in a lower proficiency than if that time was invested in one.

This means that the choice isn’t usually between speaking one language perfectly or several languages perfectly: it’s between speaking one language better or multiple languages worse. My desire to learn multiple languages has drained the energy I could have spent mastering just one.

if you’re not planning on traveling frequently, knowing multiple languages is less useful at home than being more proficient in a single language.

The bragging rights aren’t worth it.

Some of this might be because of maintenance headaches. I haven’t spoken Marathi in a few years, and while relearning is faster than starting fresh, it’s probably going to take me at least a few sessions before I can speak it comfortably again—and bragging about speaking languages that you cannot immediately produce is pretty weak.

But the bigger part is that bragging is generally overrated. Outside of job interviews or other social contexts where listing your accomplishments is expected, conspicuously bringing up personal accomplishments is not a great way to win friends.

Thus, I think any motivation to learn multiple languages has to come from within. If you’re just doing it to seem cool, you’re probably better off getting a tattoo.

 

Why Might Learning Multiple Languages Be Worth It?

That something is overrated doesn’t mean it’s without value—just that it’s likely worth less than the hype.

There are good reasons for learning multiple languages, and if I had to go back and do it again, I would still do the same projects:

Each new language opens more cultures and places to you. The motivation here is the same as wanting to travel and learn one language instead of just sticking with your mother tongue. Vat and I started with wanting to do a world trip—we added language learning later on.

For short-term travel, speaking poorly is often sufficient. Even low levels of ability are often appreciated by native speakers when you’re traveling. Thus, if your main goal is to travel a lot, learning a number of languages poorly may be more useful than mastering one.

You get a better understanding of languages, in general. Metalinguistic awareness may not be your cup of tea, but I’ve found that learning multiple languages has given me a much more generalized picture of languages and learning than I had when I had only learned French.