Precerpt: My 20th Language - Introduction (Leaver)

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication) from My 20th Language by Betty Lou Leaver, Ph.D. --

Introduction

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a polyglot—although I have formally and informally studied twenty languages, the most recent being Indonesian, which I undertook over a three-week period at the age of seventy-four. After this intensive study, I spent four weeks in Indonesia conducting faculty development in English for limited English speakers at a government institution. During my time there, I found myself needing Indonesian in countless practical situations: communicating with drivers, navigating train stations between Bandung and Jakarta, checking into hotels, and—perhaps most memorably—combining various nouns with "tidak berfungsi" (does not work) when dealing with hotel staff in Bandung. I helped my co-teacher order at restaurants, asked for directions (or more typically, how to get back to where I started, given my exceptional directional challenges), and built rapport with local administrators who were delighted that I cared enough about their culture to learn their language to a communicative level.

On several occasions when our professional interpreter fell ill or had emergencies, he would text me—usually in Indonesian—asking me to step in as interpreter for my co-teacher and institutional personnel who didn't speak English. These experiences were challenging and fun, and they accelerated my proficiency rapidly.

The Polyglot vs. The Pragmatic Language Learner

This brings me to an important distinction. Polyglots, for the most part, learn languages simply to learn languages. They collect linguistic knowledge and, to a lesser extent, proficiency for the satisfaction of accumulating languages. Language learning often becomes their primary focus—either as an extensive hobby or as their life's work. They are facile linguists who can move from one language to another with ease, and the most skilled can serve as interpreters.

However, polyglots often focus so intensively on the languages themselves that they cannot serve as experts on the communities, political systems, social structures, or cultural nuances of the societies that use these languages. While one might expect a language learner to be both a linguistic and cultural expert, typically the polyglot can read, understand, write, and speak grammatically correct language without having the time to travel to all the places where these languages are spoken or to develop the deep cultural knowledge that comes from working and living within these communities.

Let me illustrate this difference with an example I'll keep deliberately vague to avoid embarrassing anyone. I know a highly talented language collector who was completely trained in linguistic aspects and could produce correct words and grammar as needed. However, this training could only take him to an advanced level. Reaching professional proficiency requires greater communicative competence and sociolinguistic understanding that usually comes only from cultural immersion. Near-native levels demand not only pragmatic competence but also sociolinguistic finesse, deep structural understanding, knowledge of obsolete forms, specialized vocabularies, and the ability to target language appropriately for specific audiences. While polyglots can serve as interpreters, in my experience they rarely qualify as effective instructors because they are not cultural carriers—and yes, foreigners can become cultural carriers if they spend sufficient time immersed in a culture, engaging in both social and professional activities within it.

My Approach: Languages as Tools

I do not consider myself a polyglot. While I have studied and developed various levels of working proficiency in twenty languages, I learn languages for specific purposes—to use them for work or personal interaction, for utilitarian goals, or to engage with communities that use the language.

Beyond these twenty studied languages, I can read and understand—to varying degrees—many others, primarily because they are linguistically or historically related to languages I have studied. When I encounter them during travel or research, I can often navigate basic communication. To my core twenty, I could easily add Danish, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, Romanian, and Swedish. I might even include British English—while American English is my native language and I speak a New England dialect, British English often requires frequent interpretation when I'm in Great Britain.

The question of dialects complicates any language count. In Arabic, I speak primarily Jordanian but can manage other Levantine dialects (Syrian, Palestinian, Lebanese) when necessary, and I've survived in Bahrain and Egypt using broken Arabic dialect alongside English. I grew up with Canadian French, studied Old French, developed near-passable Parisian French, and can cope with African francophone dialects. Thanks to studying Old Church Slavonic, Pan-Slavic, and Old Russian, I find most Slavic languages comprehensible—Belarusian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian—though I typically respond in Russian.

Then there are languages where I've picked up survival phrases for short-term work assignments: Cambodian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Thai, Turkmen, and Uzbek. I once gave a televised speech in Uzbek, though it was entirely memorized with help from an Uzbek friend. These were learned at very limited levels and quickly abandoned once the need disappeared.

In total honesty, I've dealt with nearly fifty languages and dialects, though I've forgotten many details. This makes it difficult to count exactly how many languages I "know"—a term that first requires definition.

The Multiplier Effect of Language Families

My language count multiplied naturally through linguistic relationships. When researching in Helsinki in 1989, I relied on Swedish to interpret signs and learn some Finnish—ironic since I'd never studied Swedish. I understood it because of my professional German proficiency, study of Old German, and extensive reading of German literature from its origins to contemporary works. Combined with my native English and exposure to Old and Middle English through literature classes, I had unconsciously acquired much Proto-Germanic understanding. Swedish, Dutch, and Danish became transparent variants using similar roots, stems, and phonetic change patterns.

Similarly, through intensive study of Modern Russian, Old Russian, and Old Church Slavonic, plus exposure to Czech and Polish, I could read essentially any Slavic language using word similarities and typical variations stemming from Proto-Balto-Slavic origins. My native language plus four foreign languages multiplied effortlessly into at least ten additional languages. My twentieth language might well represent my sixtieth in practical terms.

The Context Switch Phenomenon

I rarely experience interference between languages, though it sometimes occurs at conversation beginnings when my brain needs to "lock in" on the target language. Oddly, if my brain doesn't know which language to expect, I cannot follow conversations even in languages I know well.

A memorable example occurred about ten years ago while doing language-related work for NASA. Sitting in Moscow's Pulkova Airport VIP lounge, I was reading a Russian magazine when a man across from me began speaking. I couldn't understand him, so assuming anyone at this less-frequented airport would know Russian, I asked in Russian, "Na kakom yazyke vy govorite?" (What language are you speaking?)

He looked puzzled and shook his head—clearly no Russian. Trying English as a universal lingua franca, I asked, "What language are you speaking?"

He stared at me as if I were an imbecile and replied, "English!"

"Oh, okay," I responded. "Now that I know you're speaking English, we can communicate."

This phenomenon occurs regularly. Even in languages I know well, I need some contextual clue about which language I'm hearing. While I haven't met others with this exact experience, many multilingual speakers share similar context-switching needs. My language skills consistently improve rapidly when I'm in countries where the target language is spoken, confirming that context remains crucial for my learning and performance.

The Purpose of This Book

When I began studying my nineteenth language in 2010, I started taking notes to identify learning behaviors and activities that might inform approaches in the twenty-plus language programs I directed. However, I quickly discovered that documenting my process took longer than actually learning the language. I was preparing to attend a shura (a Pashtun village meeting) of AfPak Hands—military experts in Afghan culture to whom my program instructors taught Dari and Pashto. With the Kabul meeting just a month away, I was impatient to focus on learning rather than documentation, so I abandoned my notes.

This book represents my return to that documentation process. It is not intended for scientists, linguists, or polyglots, but for students struggling with language learning who must or want to become better language learners. Having studied twenty languages, overseen programs in nearly three times that many, and taught Russian, French, German, Spanish, and English as a Foreign Language in classrooms, I have accumulated knowledge about language learning and numerous practical techniques worth sharing.

My original intent, dating from 2010 (procrastination—or at least, time impairment—is in my lifeblood) was to write about that nineteenth language (Pashto), but I ended up learning another, Indonesian, along the way. I had planned to study Aramaic specifically to document the learning process from start to finish, finally taking those systematic notes I'd abandoned years earlier. Instead, Indonesian emerged as a necessity and became my 20th language. If my days are not numbered and opportunity allows me to return to the original plan of documenting a completely new language such as modern Aramaic, I may indeed be able to produce a book about my 21^st language that is as completely detailed and documented as I would like. For now, I will live and share what has been given to me to learn: a practical guide distilled from decades of language learning experience, designed to help others navigate their own linguistic journeys more effectively.

For more posts about language learning, click HERE.

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