The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
36. How Many Languages Can a Person Learn?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Richard Hudson [+]
University College London
Richard Hudson is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at University College, London, where he worked from 1964 through 2004. He has a B.A. in Modern and Medieval Languages from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, with a thesis on the grammar of the Cushitic language of the Beja (or Bedawie) people in the north-east of the Sudan.
Description
We are all born as potential polyglots. Learning five or six languages is completely within the normal range, and requires no skills other than those we use when we learn our first language in childhood.