Crossing language borders, by Carmen Parafita-Couto

The story of the Tower of Babel reflects the enduring fascination with the origins of language diversity. It is estimated that around 7,000 languages are spoken in the world, and yet, we are able to communicate with each other. This would not be possible if our flexible brains could not learn and manage more than one language. In fact, multilingualism is the norm across the world. Although mixing languages in the same conversation or sentence is sometimes perceived negatively, many multilingual communities engage in this practice. This fascinating ability is known as code-switching. Instead of celebrating this unique human cognitive capacity, language purism considers this linguistic behaviour as undesirable. Derogatory terms like “Spanglish” (mixture of Spanish and English) or “Papialands” (combining Papiamento and Dutch) are often used to describe code-switching, highlighting how it is popularly conceived as an unordered, corrupt mixture of the two languages. Yet, multilinguals make choices as to when, where, and with whom to code-switch and intuitively regulate the points where they make a switch. In this talk, I will discuss data from different multilingual communities to shed light on the factors that influence the way multilingual speakers communicate, including the similarities and differences between speakers and communities. We will see how the curse that dispersed and punished humankind in the story of Babel could not work in real life. Language diversity is not a barrier, since our brain is perfectly able to host more than one language. Overall, multilingualism is a wonderful example of the great flexibility and adaptability of the human brain.