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I'm from Afghanistan. I can speak Pashto, Dari, Farsi, knowledge of Arabic, and Urdu.

I'm from Pakistan and I speak English, Urdu, Spanish and French.

I'm from Vietnam and I can speak some languages.

English, of course, French, a little bit Russian, a little bit German.

More than half of the world's people speak more than one language,

and that will include many of you listening to this edition of Discovery from the BBC.

Some of you may have been forced to learn a language at school

or you've had to pick one up because you've moved to a new country.

Others of you may just love learning new tongues and do so before you visit a new place.

There's nothing new about our ability to be multilingual.

And certainly we can easily achieve speaking many languages.

And in fact if you look across the world you find that a lot of even not many of them

survive but the hunter-gatherer societies of many early agricultural societies that we still have surviving nowadays

have a lot of multilingualism.

So in Australia for instance is quite usually in some tribes that everybody has to marry someone from outside the tribe which means

from outside the language community so basically marrying someone speaking the

same language will be considered incestuous and practically all children grow up having a mother and father speaking

different languages and they will learn mother's language because then when they

go to the grandparents they will hear this language and so on. I'm Gaya Vintz

...