4.3 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2016
⏱️ 27 minutes
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More than half of the world's people speak more than one language. Some people may have been forced to learn a language at school or had to pick up one because they moved to a new country. Others may just love learning new tongues and do so before they visit a new place. Recently, psychologists have discovered that knowing more than one language helps us in some surprising ways. The skill of bilinguals to switch focus by filtering out or inhibiting one language to concentrate on the relevant one is the one that is thought to bring wider benefits. Schools that teach in a second language have found that their students do better in tests in their original language. Gaia Vince explores the research that shows the benefits of bilingualism.
Image: Children in an English-Mandarin dual language art class at Bohunt School, Liphook, Hampshire, credit: Gaia Vince
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0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
0:03.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, |
0:07.0 | go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. |
0:10.0 | I'm from Afghanistan. I can speak Pashto, Dari, Farsi, knowledge of Arabic, and Urdu. |
0:21.6 | I'm from Pakistan and I speak English, Urdu, Spanish and French. |
0:26.0 | I'm from Vietnam and I can speak some languages. |
0:30.0 | English, of course, French, a little bit Russian, a little bit German. |
0:34.0 | More than half of the world's people speak more than one language, |
0:38.0 | and that will include many of you listening to this edition of Discovery from the BBC. |
0:43.0 | Some of you may have been forced to learn a language at school |
0:46.7 | or you've had to pick one up because you've moved to a new country. |
0:50.0 | Others of you may just love learning new tongues and do so before you visit a new place. |
0:56.0 | There's nothing new about our ability to be multilingual. |
1:00.0 | And certainly we can easily achieve speaking many languages. |
1:04.2 | And in fact if you look across the world you find that a lot of even not many of them |
1:09.1 | survive but the hunter-gatherer societies of many early agricultural societies that we still have surviving nowadays |
1:15.6 | have a lot of multilingualism. |
1:17.9 | So in Australia for instance is quite usually in some tribes that everybody has to marry someone from outside the tribe which means |
1:24.6 | from outside the language community so basically marrying someone speaking the |
1:28.8 | same language will be considered incestuous and practically all children grow up having a mother and father speaking |
1:34.8 | different languages and they will learn mother's language because then when they |
1:38.0 | go to the grandparents they will hear this language and so on. I'm Gaya Vintz |
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