Multilingualism is the ability to speak more than one language. The ability to speak two languages is "bilingualism," a type of multilingualism. Many immigrants are bilingual and speak languages of both their old and their new country. Multilingualism is useful in many kinds of work. International trade is more common than in past centuries. Some countries and organizations having more than one official language hire people who speak more than one so that they can work with more people.
Most people have a first language that they learned as babies. Other languages are usually learned much later.
People who learn many languages can find it easier to learn more languages if the new language is like the ones they already know. Sometimes, however learning a new language can be hard if the person remembers old languages they learned before.[1]
Learning a second language can make it harder to remember words.[2] People used to think that speaking two languages makes people better at certain thinking tasks, but some new research says otherwise. Those who speak two languages are not better at learning languages than those who only speak one.[3] [4] People who are very good at speaking two or more languages were once thought to have better thinking skills and less likely to get certain diseases like dementia later in life, but recent studies disagree.[5]
Some linguists think there are more multilingual people in the world than monolingual people, those who speak only one language[6][7]
People who can speak several languages are called "polyglots". Those who can speak many, such as Heinrich Schliemann and Ghil'ad Zuckermann, are called "hyperpolyglots".[8]
As a result of wars, borders change, which may put some people in a country which uses a different language. This happened in the partitions of Poland and its reunification. When Austria-Hungary lost World War I, Hungary lost much of its east to Romania. Hungarian is completely different from Indo-European languages including Romanian and most other languages in Europe.
- Code-switching
- Diglossia
- European Parliament - uses many languages
- Multialphabetism
- Multiculturalism
- Mutual intelligibility
- Second language
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