It’s commonly said that the majority of
people in the world are bilingual This means that they know two or more natural
languages. (For the purpose of this post we will call the spoken and written
languages like English the natural languages.)
It used to be that only people who had
learnt their languages very young and had a native-speaker mastery of them could
be considered true bilinguals. In recent times, however, it has been allowed
that people who only know a second language imperfectly or can only use it in
limited contexts can also be classed as bilinguals. The
progressive widening can be followed in the early pages of Grandjean (see
Sources below).
Now we propose a further widening. It is to
include non-natural languages whose
speakers, writers and signers add up to a vast number. So many that the number of
bilinguals surpasses a majority and approaches a totality.
We hypothesize that the cognitive
mechanisms of the natural languages and our additions are the same; the same
not only in the operation of each language but also in the higher-level
monitoring and switching apparatus. At least there is no evidence to the
contrary.
Sign languages
We can dispose of sign languages for the deaf quickly. It is
now generally agreed that they are languages in their own right and not merely
re-encodings of spoken languages. They are much more complex than the ‘finger
spelling’ idea that many people still have of them. There are people, typically
relatives of deaf parents or siblings, who use both a sign language and a
spoken language. Those people are unquestionably bilingual. There are also a
few people who know more than one sign language, for example Canadian Sign
Language and Quebec Sign Language. However, the sign/voice bilinguals only
constitute a fringe of the deaf communities and are therefore not numerous in
the overall picture.
Maths
Quite the opposite is the class of
mathematical bilinguals and multilinguals, who are very numerous throughout the
world. Infants start to learn to count speaking words: one, two, three, etc.,
or the equivalents in their language. Then they go to school and learn to write
the numbers in the universal notation: 1, 2, 3, etc. – the so-called Arabic
numerals – along with the basic operators: +,-, =, etc. From then on they are
numerically bilingual, for they are also capable of writing one, to, three,
etc. They may even be multilingual:
paradoxically Arabic itself not only uses what we call Arabic numerals but it
also has a native set of characters of its own.
However, numerical bilingualism does not
stop at the graphical level. Many of us have grown up with different counting
systems that led to a need for conversion between them. Conversion from
traditional weights and measures to decimal ones required a good deal of mental
effort for Canadians. And the French number words from 70 to 99 (soixante-dix to
quatre-vingt-dix-neuf) may come easily to native French speakers but not to
second-language learners, who have to switch consciously between a base-10
system and a base-20 one.
But is numerical notation a
language? Whichever definition is used, a language contains
the following components:
- There
must be a vocabulary of words or
symbols.
- Meaning must
be attached to the words or symbols.
- A
language employs grammar, which
is a set of rules that outline how vocabulary is used.
- A syntax organizes symbols into linear
structures or propositions.
- A narrative or discourse consists of strings of
syntactic propositions.
- There
must be (or have been) a group of people who use and understand the
symbols.
Mathematics meets all of these requirements.
In short, educated people throughout the
world are numerically bilingual, and there are a lot of them.
Music
Music has features in common with
translating. It starts in infancy and develops through amateur singing or
playing till it reaches the expert and perhaps professional level. Singer often
means someone who sings at the expert level just as translator often means
someone who translates at the expert level. And both music and translation have
notations. In the case of translation they are the natural languages; in the
case of music it is a notation that is far from natural, on the contrary is very complex and must be learnt.
But is musical notation a language? A
prior question is whether music is a language. According to DiFrancesco and
Wells it is (see Sources). If so, then its notation is a language.
As with maths notation, there are
unexpected complexities. For example, the simultaneous transposition of the
notation that players of certain instruments like the oboe must practice. And,
as with maths, most people learn only the basics; even Pavarotti said he could
read a melody but not a full score. However, it is now admitted that bilinguals
are not necessarily expert in their two languages.
The above examples are far from
exhaustive – there are in addition, for example, the many computer coding
languages -- but they are enough to show that there are many more bilinguals
and even multilinguals than those who are counted on the basis of the natural
languages.
Sources
François Grandjean. Life With Two
Languages, Harvard University Press, 1984.
Anne Marie Helmenstine. Why mathematics
is a language. ThoughtCo, 27 June 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/why-mathematics-is-a-language-4158142 or click [HERE].
Jenna DiFrancesco and Tasha Wells. Is
music a language? SlideShare, 2011. https://www.slideshare.net/princessjd90/is-music-a-language or click [HERE].
Image
Ventajas del bilingüismo para el cerebro.
Source: blogs.unini.org.
