Intuition often reveals the connections that reason has yet to trace.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Intuition is one of humanity’s highest cognitive faculties. Yet it has never been more neglected or devalued than in our rational-scientific age.
At a wine bar in Corsica, I ordered a glass of Vermentino and got chatting about wine with the sommelier who brought it to me. After a time, I ordered another glass, and we spoke again. I like testing my intuitions, so I said, at point blank, “You write poetry, don’t you?” The chap, taken aback by my sorcery, confirmed that he did indeed write poetry, and even that some of his poems had been published.
An intuition is a disposition to believe formed without hard evidence or conscious deliberation. I say ‘disposition to believe’ rather than ‘belief’ because an intuition is usually held with less certainty or firmness than a belief; and ‘believe’ rather than ‘know’ because an intuition is not justified in the normal sense, and not necessarily true or accurate.
It is not just that intuition is arrived at without hard evidence or conscious deliberation, but that these can impede it. ‘I am not absentminded,’ wrote the polymath GK Chesterton, ‘it is presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.’
Intuition vs Instinct
Intuition is often confused with instinct. Instinct is not the same as intuition. Whereas intuition is a disposition to believe without conscious reasoning, instinct is an innate tendency towards a particular behaviour. Instinct is not a sense about something, but a tendency to do something. ‘Anna stepped back, intuiting that the dog would follow its instinct and attack.’
Although we ordinarily associate instincts with animals, human beings also have quite a few, even if they are, or can be, strongly modified by culture, temperament, and experience. Examples of human instincts include any number of phobias (fear of heights, fear of spiders, fear of snakes…), territoriality, tribal loyalty, and the urge to procreate and rear their young. These instincts are often modified, redirected, or sublimed: for example, tribal loyalty may find an outlet in sport, and the urge to procreate may take the more rarefied form of romantic love.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle adds that human beings have an instinct for truth, and in the Poetics, that we have an instinct for rhythm and harmony. Obviously, he hadn’t seen my dancing.
The Psychology and Philosophy of Intuition
If intuition is not instinct, how does it operate?
An intuition involves a coming together of facts, concepts, experiences, thoughts, and feelings that are loosely linked but too disparate and peripheral for deliberate or rational processing. As this reflection is sub- or semi-conscious and the workings are hidden, an intuition appears to arise ex nihilo, out of nothing and nowhere, and cannot, or at least not readily, be justified.
What makes an intuition so hard to support and argue for is that it is founded less on arguments and evidence than on the interconnection of things. It hangs, delicately, intricately, and invisibly, like a spider’s web.
Many of humanity’s greatest insights seem to have arisen in this way. Archimedes is said to have leapt from his bath crying, ‘Eureka!’ after discovering how to determine the purity of a gold crown. Socrates attributed many of his most important decisions to his daimonion, an inner voice that warned rather than reasoned. After struggling for months with a mathematical problem, Henri Poincaré suddenly saw its solution while stepping onto a bus. The chemist August Kekulé dreamt of a snake swallowing its own tail before recognising the ring structure of benzene. Srinivasa Ramanujan attributed many of his astonishing mathematical discoveries to dreams sent by the goddess Namagiri. Such breakthroughs seem sudden only because the mind has been quietly at work beneath the surface.
The surfacing of an intuition, which can also occur in dream or meditation, is often mingled with a concordant feeling such as joy or fear, or simple pride and pleasure at the supreme cognitive and human achievement that an intuition represents.
How to Invite Intuition
If this is how intuition works, we can cultivate it by expanding the range of our experiences, and by tearing down the barriers—such as biases, fears, and inhibitions—that prevent them from coalescing.
We should also give ourselves more time and space for free association. My own intuitive faculty is sharpest when walking, showering, travelling, or otherwise daydreaming, and when I am well rested.
The more richly furnished the mind, the more deeply it can intuit. There is no such thing as wasted knowledge.
Finally, we should acknowledge the place and power of intuition. We have micro-intuitions all the time, about what to eat, what to wear, what road to take, whom to talk to, what to say, how to respond, and so on. I call them micro-intuitions because they rely on a great number of subtle variables and largely escape conscious processing. But what about the macro-intuitions?
Never in the history of humanity has the intuitive or mystic faculty been more neglected or devalued than in our rational-scientific age.
Perhaps our greatest error has been to pit intuition against reason. They are not rivals, but partners. Intuition points the way; reason clears the path.
Ever Met a Clever Fool? Why Intelligence Alone Is Not Enough
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Every time I utter the word ‘wisdom’, someone giggles or sneers. Wisdom, more so even than expertise, does not sit comfortably in an egalitarian, anti-elitist society. In an age dominated by materialism and consumerism, science and technology, and specialisation and compartmentalisation, it is too loose, too grand, and too mysterious a concept. With our heads in our smartphones and tablets, in our bills and bank statements, we simply do not have the time or mental space for it—or even the idea of it.
But things were not always thus.
The word wisdom features 222 times in the Old Testament, which includes all of seven so-called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.
Here is Ecclesiastes 7:12:
For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.
The word philosophy literally means ‘the love of wisdom’, and wisdom is the overarching aim of philosophy—or, at least, ancient philosophy.
In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates tells the young Lysis that, without wisdom, he will be of no worth to anyone:
And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else, will love you.
The patron goddess of Athens, the city in which the Lysis is set, is none other than Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprang out from the skull of Zeus. Her symbol, and the symbol of wisdom, is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.
Indeed, wisdom derives from the Proto-Indo-European root weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin gouged out one of his eyes and offered it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of knowledge and wisdom, symbolically trading one mode of perception for another, higher one.
Is Wisdom the Same as Knowledge?
People often speak of ‘knowledge and wisdom’ as though they might be closely related or even the same thing. So one hypothesis is that wisdom is knowledge, or a great deal of knowledge. But if wisdom is knowledge, then it has to be a certain kind of knowledge, or else learning the telephone directory, or the names of all the rivers in the world, might count as wisdom.
Nor can it simply be scientific or technical knowledge, or else every contemporary person would be wiser than the wisest of ancient philosophers. Any twenty-first-century school-leaver would be wiser than a Seneca or Socrates.
Remember: the Delphic oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all people not because he knew everything, or even very much, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.
Still, there seems to be more to wisdom than mere ‘negative knowledge’, or else I could simply be super-sceptical about everything and count myself wise.
Or maybe wisdom consists in having high epistemic standards, that is, in having a high bar for believing something, and an even higher bar for calling that belief knowledge. But then we are back to a picture of wisdom as something like science…
So Is Wisdom Simply Correct Opinion?
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates notices that people of wisdom and virtue seem remarkably poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and throwing the javelin, yet no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, Pericles and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.
If wisdom cannot be taught, how, asks Meno, did good people come about? Socrates replies that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A person who has knowledge of the road to Larisa (a city-state in Thessaly) may make a good guide. But a person who has only correct opinion about the road, despite never having travelled it, might make an equally good guide.
Knowledge and correct opinion can therefore lead to the same destination.
Since wisdom cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge; and if it cannot be knowledge, it can only be correct opinion—which explains why paragons of wisdom such as Themistocles, Lysimachus, and Pericles were unable to impart their wisdom even unto their own sons.
Wise people, says Socrates, are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.
Or Is Wisdom the Same as Understanding?
Aristotle gives us another clue in the Metaphysics, when he says that wisdom is the understanding of causes. None of the five senses are regarded as wisdom because, although they provide the most authoritative knowledge of sensible particulars, they are unable to discern the more distant causes of anything.
Similarly, we suppose artists to be wiser than artisans because artists know the ‘why’ or cause, and can therefore teach, whereas artisans do not, and cannot.
In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things, which calls for more distant and elevated perspectives, and perhaps also the ability or willingness to shift between perspectives.
In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero cites as a paragon of wisdom the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who, upon being informed of the death of his son, simply said, “I knew that I begot a mortal.”
For Cicero, true sapience consists in preparing oneself for every eventuality, so as never to be taken—or overtaken—by surprise. And it is true that wisdom, the understanding of causes and connexions, has forever been associated with both insight and foresight.
What, Then, Is Wisdom?
Wisdom is not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.
When we take a few steps back, like when we stand under the shower or go on holiday, we begin to behold the bigger picture. In common parlance, ‘wisdom’ has two opposites: ‘foolishness’ and ‘folly’, which both derive from the Latin follis (‘bellows’, ‘bag’) and involve, respectively, lack and loss of perspective.
In cultivating a broader perspective, it helps, of course, to be knowledgeable, but it also helps to be intelligent, reflective, open-minded, and disinterested—which is why we often seek out and pay for independent advice.
Above all, it helps to be courageous, because the view from on high, though it can be exhilarating, and ultimately liberating, is at first terrifying—not least because it conflicts with so much that we have been taught or enculturated to think.
Courage, said Aristotle, is the first of the human qualities, because it is the one which underwrites all the others.
Does Language Merely Express Our Thoughts—or Does It Help to Create Them?
Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 22 August 2026.
Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows. Punting in Oxford on a late summer evening. Can you hear it?
Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other means. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with conceptual thought, problem solving, and creativity. These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits, such as philosophy, art, and science, that define us as human beings.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without language itself. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty of sight or the faculty of language? This is probably the first time that you have faced this question: The faculty of language is so fundamental to what it means to be human that, unlike the faculty of sight, we take it completely for granted. ‘Monkeys’ quipped Kenneth Grahame, ‘very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’ Monks, too, are the same.
If rhetoric, the beauty of language, can so bend us, how about language itself? In other words, how does the language you speak influence the way you think? The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, that’s for sure, but does it also determine thought, as claimed by Sapir and Whorf?
Does Language Determine Thought?
Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over seven thousand languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out every two weeks or so. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive and think about more than just two colours.
More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht, which denotes dissatisfaction with reality and yearning for a richer, ‘realer’ ideal. But despite lacking the word, the American poet Walt Whitman (d. 1892) was able, quite successfully, to conjure both the concept and the emotion: Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.
The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (‘orphan’), and a word for people who have lost their spouse (‘widow’ or ‘widower’), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover’s face or other part of their anatomy. Animals and pre-linguistic babies surely have thoughts, even though they have no language.
How Does Language Interact with Thought?
If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades and the other for darker shades—goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy, but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy. Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived in the UK for a long time see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, by carving up the world, language supports and enhances cognition.
In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak of ‘the wine-dark sea’. But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for ‘love’, including philia, eros, storge, and agape, each one referring to a different type or concept of love, respectively, friendship, sexual love, familial love, and universal or charitable love. This means that the Ancient Greeks could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, lead more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps they had more words for love because they led more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.
Philosophers and academics sometimes make up words to help them talk and think about an issue. In the Phaedrus, Plato coined the word psychagogia, the art of leading souls, while discussing rhetoric—which, it turns out, is another word that he invented. Every field of human endeavour invariably evolves its own specialised jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.
While we’re talking dead languages, it may come as a surprise that Latin has no direct translations for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Instead, one either echoes the verb in the question (in affirmative or negative) or expresses one’s feelings about the truth value of the proposition with adverbs such as certe, fortasse, nimirum, plane, vero, etiam, sane, minime… This may have led to more nuanced thinking, as well as greater interpersonal engagement, though it must have been a nightmare for teens—if they even had teens in those days.
More than a century before Sapir and Whorf, Humboldt (Wilhelm, not Alexander) arrived at a similar insight: every language embodies a particular Weltansicht, or view of the world. Language is not simply a system of labels for an already divided reality, but a way of dividing and organising reality.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897).
Built-in Bias and Prejudice
As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. English, for instance, restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has read’) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that—or, at least, subconsciously.
Language is full of built-in assumptions and prejudices of this kind. Here’s another, more substantial example. When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasise the agent (‘I fired the gun’) more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent (‘the gun went off’). One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events—and, I surmise, to attach blame.
Some languages seem more egocentric than others. Many languages forgo the explicit use of the personal pronoun, which is instead built into the verb. For example, ‘I want’ in Spanish is simply quiero. English in contrast requires the explicit use of the personal pronoun in all cases, as does French. Unlike Spanish and Italian, French has lost many of the spoken distinctions between its verb endings, making the personal pronoun necessary: je parle, tu parles, il parle… all sound essentially the same. What’s more, French speakers often double up on the first-person personal pronoun, as in Moi, je pense que… [Me, I think that] with the stress on the moi. Sometimes, they also redouble on other personal pronouns, Et toi, qu’en penses-tu? [And you, what do you think about it?]. But redoubling on the first-person personal pronoun is much more common: Bon allez, moi j’en ai marre [Whatever, I’m fed up me]. Because je is obligatory, French calls for the additional moi to place special emphasis on the speaker. This redoubling, this pleonasm, is more a feature of the spoken than the written word, and, depending on the context, can serve to emphasise or simply acknowledge a difference of opinion. Equivalent forms in English are more strained and recondite, and less commonly used, for example, ‘Well, as for me, I think that…’ The redoubling, in French, on the first-person personal pronoun seems to inject drama into a conversation, as though the speaker were acting out her own part, or playing up her difference and separateness.
In English, verbs express tense, that is, the time relative to the moment of speaking. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality), that is, whether the information has been acquired directly through sense perception, or only indirectly by testimony or inference. In Russian, verbs include information about completion, with (to simplify a bit) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasises modes of being, with two verbs for ‘to be’—ser, to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar, to indicate temporary states and locations. Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. There used to be a similar distinction in English, with ‘thou’ used to express intimacy, familiarity, or downright rudeness—but because it is archaic, many people now think of it as more formal than ‘you’: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate… It stands to reason that, compared to English speakers, Turkish speakers have to pay more attention to evidentiality, Russian speakers to completion, and Spanish speakers to modes of being and social relations. In the words of Jakobson, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’ Language may not prevent us from thinking certain thoughts, but it may make those thoughts more unlikely, and compel us, every time we speak, to notice certain features of the world.
In many languages, nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. In German, there is a third, neutral class of nouns. In Dyribal, an Aboriginal language, there are four noun classes, including one for women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals—or, as Lakoff put it, ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. Researchers asked German speakers and Spanish speakers to describe objects with opposite gender assignments in German and Spanish and found that their descriptions conformed to gender stereotypes, even when the testing took place in English. For example, teutophones tended to describe bridges (feminine in German, die Brücke) as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, whereas hispanophones tended to describe bridges (masculine in Spanish, el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.
Another study looking at the personification in art of abstract concepts such as love, justice, and time found that, in 78% of cases, the gender of the concept in the artist’s language predicted the gender of the personification, and that this pattern held even for uncommon allegories such as geometry, necessity, and silence. Compared to a French or Spanish artist, a German artist is far more likely to paint death [der Tod, la mort, la muerte] or victory [der Sieg, la victoire, la victoria] as a man—though all artists, or at least all Western artists, tend to paint death in skeletal form. So grammar, it seems, can directly and radically influence thought, perception, and action.
It is often said that, by de-emphasising them, language perpetuates biases against women. For example, many writers in English continue to use ‘mankind’ to talk about humankind, and ‘he’ for ‘he or she’. Similarly, many languages use masculine plural pronouns to refer to groups of people with at least one man. If a hundred women turn up with a baby in a pram, and that baby happens to have a penis, French grammar dictates the use of the masculine plural ils: ils sont arrivés, ‘they have arrived’.
Language changes as attitudes change, and sometimes politicians, pressure groups, and others attempt to change the language to change the attitudes—but, on the whole, language, or at least grammar, serves to preserve the status quo, to crystallise and perpetuate the order and culture that gave rise to it. It’s quite a thought: many of the words in our mouths are thousands of years old, or built from shorter words that are. They are by far the oldest thing about us.
Language is also made up of all sorts of metaphors. In English and Swedish, people tend to speak of time in terms of distance: ‘I won’t be long’; ‘let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’; ‘his drinking finally caught up with him’. But in Spanish or Greek, people tend to speak of time in terms of size or volume—for example, in Spanish, hacemos una pequeña pausa [let’s have a small break] rather than corta pausa [short break]. More generally, mucho tiempo [much time] is preferred to largo tiempo [long time], and, in Greek, poli ora to makry kroniko diastima. And guess what… According to a study of bilingual Spanish-Swedish speakers, the language used to estimate the duration of events alters the speaker’s perception of the relative passage of time.
But all in all, with a few exceptions, European languages, or even Indo-European languages, do not differ dramatically from one another. In contrast, to talk about space, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal language, use sixteen words for absolute cardinal directions instead of relative references such as ‘right in front of you’, ‘to the right’, and ‘over there’. As a result, even their children are always aware of the exact direction in which they are facing. When asked to arrange a sequence of picture cards in temporal order, English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, whereas Hebrew or Arabic speakers tend to arrange them from right to left. But speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre consistently arrange them from east to west, which is left to right if they are facing south, and right to left if they are facing north. Thinking differently about space, they seem to think differently about time as well.
Language may not determine thought, but it focuses perception and attention on particular aspects of reality, structures and thereby enhances cognitive processes, and even to some extent regulates social relationships. Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. There is no equivalent in English of the Portuguese word saudade, which refers to the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong and so bitter as to have written itself into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal [Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal]. The three strands of language, thought, and culture are so tightly woven that they cannot be prised apart.
It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that crumbles into the sea.
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By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 23 August 2026.
It can come as a surprise to many people in the UK and US that speaking more than one language is the norm rather than the exception. In prehistoric times, most people belonged to small linguistic communities, and had to speak several languages to trade with, and marry into, neighbouring communities.
Still today, remaining populations of hunter-gatherers are almost all multilingual. Papua New Guinea, a country smaller than Spain, counts some 850 languages, or about one language per 10,000 inhabitants. In countries such as India, Malaysia, and South Africa, most people are bilingual or better. Even in the world at large, polyglots outnumber monoglots. And with the advent of the internet, contact with foreign languages has become increasingly frequent, even for the most linguistically isolated of monoglots.
In sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth I could speak at least nine languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish. A few days after her death in 1603, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli wrote back to his Doge and Senate:
She possessed nine languages so thoroughly that each appeared to be her native tongue; five of these were the languages of peoples governed by her, English, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, for that part of her possessions where they are still savage [lo scozzese per quella parte de’ suoi possessi dove sono ancora selvaggi], and Irish. All of them are so different, that it is impossible for those who speak the one to understand any of the others. Besides this, she spoke perfectly Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian extremely well.
No wonder the ‘Virgin Queen’ didn’t want to get married.
Cognitive and Economic Benefits
To speak a language competently implies knowledge of the culture associated with the language. Multilingualism is closely linked to multiculturalism, and, historically, both came under attack with the rise of the nation state. In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the British Prime Minister Theresa May stated: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’—as though that were somehow deviant or problematic. Human beings, and their tongues, are far older than any nation state.
Still today, some people believe that teaching a child more than one language can impair the child’s linguistic and cognitive development. But what’s the evidence? According to several studies, people who learn another language do significantly better on standardised tests. Language management calls upon executive functions such as attention control, cognitive inhibition, and working memory, and it appears that bi- and multilingual people are better at observing, multitasking, and problem solving. They also have a larger working memory, including for tasks that do not involve language.
Being multilingual can also improve judgement. According to one study, people who think through a moral dilemma in a foreign language come to much more rational, or utilitarian, conclusions—perhaps because certain words lose some of their emotional weight, or because the problem is seen from a different cultural perspective or processed through different neural channels. So, if you have a second language, you can use it, like a good friend, to check yourself.
The cognitive benefits of bilingualism, disputed though they are, also extend to health. A study of hospital records in Toronto, Canada, found that bilingual people were diagnosed with dementia on average three to four years later than their monolingual counterparts from a similar educational and occupational background. Another study in Northern Italy looking at people at the same stage of Alzheimer’s disease found that the bilingual people were on average five years older, and had stronger connections between the brain areas involved in executive function. Over in India, a study of 600 stroke survivors found that the bilingual ones had a much better outcome. Specifically, 40.5% of the bilingual patients had normal cognition compared to just 19.6% of the monolingual ones. Of course, multilingualism is entangled with education, occupation, and other confounding factors, but the direction of the effect is difficult to doubt.
And then there are the undisputed economic benefits. High-level bilingualism has been linked to higher income, even after controlling for confounding factors such as educational attainment and parental socio-economic status. Over the course of a forty-year career, this additional income might add up to a pension fund. Of course, the overall economic impact of multilingualism is much greater than the sum of the higher earnings of multilingual speakers. Switzerland’s multilingual heritage has been estimated to contribute as much as 10% of GDP, whereas lack of language skills in the UK could be costing the British economy around 3.5% of GDP in lost output.
Personal, Social, and Cultural Benefits
Being bilingual may have important cognitive and economic benefits, but it is usually the personal, social, and cultural benefits that multilingual people are keenest to emphasise.
Many bilingual people feel that the way they are, and the way they see the world—and even the way they laugh and love—changes according to the language that they are speaking. In the 1960s, Susan Ervin-Tripp asked Japanese-English bilingual women to finish sentences in each language, and found that the women came up with very different endings depending on whether they were speaking English or Japanese. For example, they completed ‘Real friends should…’ with ‘…help each other’ in Japanese, but ‘…be frank’ in English. ‘Who’s your favourite writer?’ ‘What do you want to eat for dinner?’ ‘Shall we break all the rules?’ Ask a question in one language, and you get one answer; ask the same question in another language, and you might get a different one. ‘To have another language,’ said Charlemagne, ‘is to have another soul.’
Translation dictionaries seem to assume that languages are made up of corresponding words, but even when that is more or less the case, the equivalencies have different connotations. Compared to ‘I like you’ in English, je t’aime in French is a far more serious proposition. George Carlin once joked that ‘meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat—but, of course, it doesn’t. Owing to a certain je ne sais quoi, some things are more readily expressed in one language than in another. By code-switching, multilingual speakers can increase their range of expression and perhaps even their range of thought. In the words of Wittgenstein: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’
Certain languages are better suited to certain purposes, for example, English is great for science and technology, French is better for cooking and complaining, and Latin is best for praying and formal rites of passage. Multilingual people are free to pick and choose, maybe along the lines of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: ‘I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.’ Charles V did not get on with the German lords and preferred to live in Spain, sitting on the newly created Spanish throne by right of his incarcerated mother, Joanna the Mad (Juana la Loca)—things I know because I speak Spanish. And after a few glasses of fino, I’m almost fluent.
The more languages we learn, the easier it becomes to learn languages. But learning a language also strengthens our first language. For instance, one study found that Spanish immersion significantly improved children’s native English vocabulary. More broadly, learning a language casts light upon our first language and language in general, increasing our appreciation of language and ability to communicate. ‘You speak English beautifully,’ wrote Robert Aickman in The Wine-Dark Sea (1966), ‘which means you can’t be English.’
Just before writing this article, I asked my social media followers the following question: ‘If you are bi- or multilingual, what do you most value about that fact?’
And here are some of their responses:
The freedom to access different cultures plus the possibility to read many authors in original version!
Being fluent in a couple of other languages has given me insight into other ways of seeing the world. That helps empathy, and openness.
I appreciate the cognitive advantages being multilingual has offered. Also the connections with culture, history, and the knowledge acquired.
Language is knowledge. Always useful to be a little less ignorant.
It feels as if I can switch into two different modes and think from different perspectives.
I’m more outgoing in one language than another. It’s not just that I speak differently—I feel like a slightly different person.
My voice, gestures, and even sense of humour change when I switch languages.
Difficult or intimate things can be easier to say in my second language. There’s a little more distance between the words and me.
Being more tolerant—new language = new culture, new and different perspectives/access to more information.
That I can talk wine with twice as many ppl.
It gives me patience and understanding for those who want to articulate, but have difficulty conveying what they really mean.
The fact that I can fully understand and communicate in another language (Afrikaans) makes me feel good.
It gave me an understanding that ‘thoughts’ don’t come into my head in a language at all. Thoughts come as ‘ideas’. Only when I have to verbalise my ideas, I have to use a language.
I’m bilingual in India. There’s nothing special about it here. Know a ton of people who are trilingual. In India, multilingualism starts becoming impressive if the language count’s above like five or something.
Obviously, being able to speak about people in elevators without them knowing what’s said. 😉
Having a variety of options when cussing.
Every language on this earth has its own rules and conventions, its own sounds and rhythms, its own beauty and poetry, its own history and philosophy. Every language on this earth is another way of being human, another way of being alive.
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