ABSTRACT
Linguists in my sense, I suspect, are made, not born. I doubt if I’d ever have become one if my curiosity about languages hadn’t been roused very early on, by living in a bilingual community. That shouldn’t be surprising. If we are all born, as Noam Chomsky first suggested, with parts of our brains ready for learning language, then surely we are going to end up as more sensitive language users if those parts are nurtured through being exposed to more than one of them. When I first encountered the way Chomsky talked about this innate ability, his ‘language acquisition device’, or LAD, I thought what a boring old metaphor that was. I still think so. If our brains are indeed wired for language, suggesting that, as humans, we’re evolutionarily eager to start this business of talking as soon as possible, then we need a more dynamic image. Something like chicks in a nest, mouths perpetually open, waiting for worms. Gimme, gimme! Only with us, it’s languages, not worms. And the more languages we manage to acquire, the more human they make us. As the French proverb goes: ‘A man who knows two languages is worth two men.’ Or the Slovakian: ‘With each newly learned language you acquire a new soul.’ At the very least, we have a MAD, not a LAD – a ‘multilingual acquisition device’.
