The Superlinguists: The polyglots

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Yes, you're listening to the BBC and the BBC.
0:03.0	You're scuthing the BBC.
0:04.0	Lejo, you're going to be BBC.
0:06.0	You're listening to the BBC, and the vast majority of this program will be in English.
0:15.6	I'm Simon Calder with the first of a new series here on the BBC World Service
0:20.8	about people who speak many languages.
0:24.0	Welcome to the super linguists.
0:26.0	Shumai the Grando E. BBC
0:28.0	B.
0:31.0	Later in the series will go to countries where you can't get by without speaking and
0:36.2	understanding several languages and to nations where people struggle to speak more than one
0:42.4	and we'll find out how anyone can learn a new story. where people struggle to speak more than one,
0:42.6	and we'll find out how anyone can learn a new language.
0:45.8	And we learned also how to say thank you.
0:51.4	What thank you?
0:52.4	Ukraine. And when you answer to say thank you. Thank you. You can't.
0:53.0	And when you answer you say?
0:55.0	Language is a code for getting a thought from my brain to your brain.
1:02.8	Super Linguists are masters of multiple codes.
1:06.9	Today I'm talking to a good few of them
1:09.2	to find out more about their formidable language achievements and what marks them out as special.
1:16.0	They call themselves Polyglots from the Greek words for many tongues. Here's how a British-born superlinguist Richard Simkot, who's currently living in North
	...

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