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the language i'm speaking right now is on its way to becomingthe world's universal language, for better or for worse. let's face it, it's the language of the internet, it's the language of finance, it's the language of air traffic control, of popular music, diplomacy --
english is everywhere. now, mandarin chineseis spoken by more people, but more chinese peopleare learning english than english speakersare learning chinese. last i heard, there are two dozen universitiesin china right now teaching all in english. english is taking over. and in addition to that,
it's been predictedthat at the end of the century almost all of the languagesthat exist now -- there are about 6,000 -- will no longer be spoken. there will only be some hundreds left. and on top of that, it's at the point whereinstant translation of live speech is not only possible,but it gets better every year. the reason i'm recitingthose things to you
is because i can tellthat we're getting to the point where a questionis going to start being asked, which is: why should welearn foreign languages -- other than if englishhappens to be foreign to one? why bother to learn another onewhen it's getting to the point where almost everybody in the worldwill be able to communicate in one? i think there are a lot of reasons, but i first want to address the one that you're probablymost likely to have heard of,
because actually it's moredangerous than you might think. and that is the idea that a language channels your thoughts, that the vocabularyand the grammar of different languages gives everybodya different kind of acid trip, so to speak. that is a marvelously enticing idea, but it's kind of fraught. so it's not that it's untrue completely.
so for example, in french and spanish the word for table is,for some reason, marked as feminine. so, "la table," "la mesa,"you just have to deal with it. it has been shown that if you are a speakerof one of those languages and you happen to be asked how you would imagine a table talking, then much more oftenthan could possibly be an accident, a french or a spanish speaker
says that the table would talkwith a high and feminine voice. so if you're french or spanish,to you, a table is kind of a girl, as opposed to if youare an english speaker. it's hard not to love data like that, and many peoplewill tell you that that means that there's a worldview that you haveif you speak one of those languages. but you have to watch out, because imagine if somebodyput us under the microscope, the us being those of uswho speak english natively.
what is the worldview from english? so for example,let's take an english speaker. up on the screen, that is bono. he speaks english. i presume he has a worldview. now, that is donald trump. in his way, he speaks english as well. (laughter)
and here is ms. kardashian, and she is an english speaker, too. so here are three speakersof the english language. what worldview do thosethree people have in common? what worldview is shaped throughthe english language that unites them? it's a highly fraught concept. and so gradual consensus is becomingthat language can shape thought, but it tends to be in rather darling,obscure psychological flutters. it's not a matter of giving youa different pair of glasses on the world.
now, if that's the case, then why learn languages? if it isn't going to changethe way you think, what would the other reasons be? there are some. one of them is that if youwant to imbibe a culture, if you want to drink it in,if you want to become part of it, then whether or notthe language channels the culture -- and that seems doubtful --
if you want to imbibe the culture, you have to control to some degree the language that the culturehappens to be conducted in. there's no other way. there's an interestingillustration of this. i have to go slightly obscure,but really you should seek it out. there's a movie by the canadianfilm director denys arcand -- read out in english on the page,"dennis ar-cand," if you want to look him up.
he did a film called "jesus of montreal." and many of the characters are vibrant, funny, passionate,interesting french-canadian, french-speaking women. there's one scene closest to the end, where they have to take a friendto an anglophone hospital. in the hospital,they have to speak english. now, they speak englishbut it's not their native language, they'd rather not speak english.
and they speak it more slowly, they have accents, they're not idiomatic. suddenly these charactersthat you've fallen in love with become husks of themselves,they're shadows of themselves. to go into a culture and to only ever process peoplethrough that kind of skrim curtain is to never truly get the culture. and so to the extent that hundredsof languages will be left, one reason to learn them
is because they are ticketsto being able to participate in the culture of the peoplewho speak them, just by virtue of the factthat it is their code. so that's one reason. second reason: it's been shown that if you speak two languages,dementia is less likely to set in, and that you are probablya better multitasker. and these are factors that set in early,
and so that ought to give you some sense of when to give junior or juniorettelessons in another language. bilingualism is healthy. and then, third -- languages are just an awful lot of fun. much more fun than we're often told. so for example,arabic: "kataba," he wrote, "yaktubu," he writes, she writes. "uktub," write, in the imperative.
what do those things have in common? all those things have in common the consonants sittingin the middle like pillars. they stay still, and the vowelsdance around the consonants. who wouldn't want to rollthat around in their mouths? you can get that from hebrew, you can get that from ethiopia'smain language, amharic. that's fun.
or languages have different word orders. learning how to speakwith different word order is like driving on the different sideof a street if you go to certain country, or the feeling that you get when youput witch hazel around your eyes and you feel the tingle. a language can do that to you. so for example, "the cat in the hat comes back," a book that i'm surewe all often return to,
like "moby dick." one phrase in it is,"do you know where i found him? do you know where he was?he was eating cake in the tub, yes he was!" fine. now, if you learn thatin mandarin chinese, then you have to master, "you can know, i did where him find? he was tub inside gorging cake, no mistake gorging chewing!"
that just feels good. imagine being able to do thatfor years and years at a time. or, have you ever learned any cambodian? me either, but if i did, i would get to roll around in my mouthnot some baker's dozen of vowels like english has, but a good 30 different vowels scooching and oozing aroundin the cambodian mouth like bees in a hive.
that is what a language can get you. and more to the point, we live in an era when it's never beeneasier to teach yourself another language. it used to be that you hadto go to a classroom, and there would besome diligent teacher -- some genius teacher in there -- but that person was onlyin there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most times.
you had to go to class. if you didn't have that,you had something called a record. i cut my teeth on those. there was only so much data on a record, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a cd. other than that you had booksthat didn't work, that's just the way it was. today you can lay down --
lie on your living room floor, sipping bourbon, and teach yourselfany language that you want to with wonderful setssuch as rosetta stone. i highly recommendthe lesser known glossika as well. you can do it any time, therefore you can do it more and better. you can give yourself your morningpleasures in various languages. i take some "dilbert" in variouslanguages every single morning;
it can increase your skills. couldn't have done it 20 years ago when the idea of havingany language you wanted in your pocket, coming from your phone, would have sounded like science fictionto very sophisticated people. so i highly recommend that you teach yourself languagesother than the one that i'm speaking, because there's never beena better time to do it.
it's an awful lot of fun. it won't change your mind, but it will most certainly blow your mind. thank you very much. (applause)