Free Babel No More by Michael Erard Page B

that language is a discrete object out in the world. Learning it involves shuttlingits pieces into your body; once you know it, it’s inside you. In the 1960s, linguists developed a twist on this by arguing that children became so good at language so quickly because when they were born, they already had pieces of language inside them.Just as you know you aren’t hungry anymore by some digestive instinct, you know a language when it reaches some predetermined mark inside you,nourishing and enlightening you. If you’ve gathered only a few pieces of a language, a snack, it can’t change you. It doesn’t count. Call this the “all or nothing” view.
    Nor does a bit of language matter as long as possessing a sole language is the political foundation of the nation-state, “a community imagined by language,” as Benedict Anderson has written. This notion emerged in Europe duringMezzofanti’s day. In the nationalist’s view, a citizen demonstrates her affiliations to the homeland by speaking and writing the national language fully. She preserves her affiliations by eschewing other languages, regional dialects, and nonstandard ways of speaking and writing. In this way, “nativeness” becomes as much a political project as a linguistic one. Speak like a citizen, speak like anative—it amounted to basically the same thing. In France, for instance, spoken and regional dialects were looked down upon in favor of the cultivated Parisian dialect; the French Revolution brought with it the unification of the language. Until the 1960s, very few Indonesians spoke bahasa Indonesia as a first or mother tongue; now millions of them speak what is, in fact, the country’s officiallanguage. Schools taught the standard language and governments created exams to test ability in that language. Soon, private companies began accepting the results of those exams for their own determinations of a person’s proficiency, his ability to serve an institution’s goals.
    Things get trickier when more than one language is involved. Here, to “know” a language means—at least in the folk viewof languages—that you keep it separate from the others you might know. For a long time, bilinguals were criticized for speaking sentences that contained both their languages. This “code switching” is very rule-governed. Yet it was viewed as a person’s inability to keep things straight, and marked, therefore, their failure to know either language. Bilinguals were seen as abundantly imperfect oroverburdened, another unfortunate implication of the “all or nothing” view.
    A bit of language matters more in parts of the world where language isn’t viewed as a discrete object, but something more diffuse and external, like clothes. You don’t put it inside yourself. Instead, you wrapyourself in it. Neither does it create some lens by which the essences of things take different forms. It’s atool. A tool you use when you need it and as often as you need to—as I needed French and Italian in the Archiginnasio. Call this the “something and something” model.
    A bit of language matters in places where the language isn’t written down, or where not many people are literate, where fewer resources for making language a fixed, bounded thing exist. Also, a bit of language matters more in countriesthat have built nationhood around many languages than in those whose national identity is founded on just one. In southern India, for instance, languages appear to be more like uniforms or badges; you wear them to tell people your social identity—the class or caste you belong to, the region you come from, your religion, family, profession, and significantly, your gender. When they treat youlike someone who speaks that language, then that’s who you are. But Mezzofanti didn’t come from any places like these. So what was he doing?
    One way to resolve these views is through the idea of “multicompetence.” This has gained some traction in the twenty years since