How languages are actually learned

Retrospective studies find dementia arriving four to five years later in bilinguals. Prospective ones mostly find nothing. The difference matters and is unresolved.

The idea that thinking in a second language makes you colder and more utilitarian is losing ground.

A bilingual brain keeps both languages live and constantly suppresses one of them.

Your language does not imprison your thinking, but it does decide what you are forced to notice.

Living between languages makes it harder to believe your own way is the default one.

A single stone carrying the same text in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek reopened three thousand years of Egyptian.

Around seven thousand languages are spoken today, and a large share have very few remaining speakers.

Length and quality of exposure predict adult results better than the age you started.

Bilinguals switch at grammatically predictable points, not randomly.

The Hungarian interpreter who taught herself sixteen languages mostly by reading novels she barely understood.

The claim that speakers of languages without a future tense save more does not hold once you control for how languages are related.

German and Spanish speakers were said to describe a bridge differently because of its grammatical gender. Two attempts to repeat it found nothing.

Swedish speakers judge duration by distance, Spanish speakers by quantity, and the same bilingual switches when the question switches language.

Across twenty-five languages, nine families and ten writing systems, almost everyone hears the same shapes in the same nonsense words.