61 Cate Hamilton

Alex G: Hi and welcome to Troublesome Terps, the podcast that keeps interpreters up at night. Today, we have a very special guest and I am here with a very special co-host who's actually very excited for today's topic. Sarah, how are you?

Sarah: I'm doing great. Thanks, Alex. Good to be here again. Yeah, I am super excited about tonight's episode because it's one of my favorite topics from college. It's one of my favorite things to talk about when I'm sitting down with a nice pint pre-pandemic, of course, in in a pub. And I don't know, I find a victim to talk to about this. And tonight, our victim and very special guest is Cate Hamilton.

Cate: Hi, how are you doing?

Sarah: So nice to have you. I'm super excited.

Alex G: I think this is the first time we've actually introduced one of our podcast guests as "she's the victim". This is the victim for tonight. But, yeah, Sarah was quite excited to talk to you.

Cate: You have to say "willing victim". And I'm very glad to be here.

Alex G: That is very true. Yes. So, Cate, you're coming to us from England, is that right?

Cate: That's right. Yes. I live in Cheltenham and I'm just studying at Oxford University at the minute. So I'm from England and I've lived in this kind of area as well as in Scotland. So, yep, I'm back near where I grew up now, in the middle, in the centre.

Alex G: Jonathan would love to hear it.

Cate: Yeah. Yes. I love languages teacher. And when I graduated, I went and became a secondary French and English teacher, and that's why I did, so my early career. And then I got married, I had children. And then I realized and it sounds a bit silly because I was a languages teacher, but when I actually had children, I realized that they have this incredible ability to learn languages. You know, as soon as I had a baby in my arms and I was one of those new parents, you haven't really held a baby before. I didn't know much about them, but I realized he was communicating with me straight away. And it was fascinating. A lot of people asked if I was going to speak to him in French because I you know, I could, I could put him up with a mixture of French and English or even whether I would just speak French to him. And I really thought about that. So all of those kind of questions became really interesting to me. So I got more and more interested in how children learn languages, which ironically I hadn't thought of, even though I was teaching secondary French. And it's not something that was really in my teacher training either. You know, there was a kind of a bizarre separation between teaching second languages and how people learn languages from birth, there wasn't really much kind of connection, which I'm kind of embarrassed to admit now, but that's how it was. So, yes. So that's my background. And then when I had the children, I set up a company where we teach languages to young children. It's called Babel Babies. And it's just that it's really it's really, really fun. And so basically the idea is that we're just having loads of fun and we sing songs and we do stories and things, but in lots of different languages. So it's not one language a time. It's like a multilingual singing group. And we go on a little world tour and we pick up songs. Do you know "Wheels on the bus”? And like "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat". So like some classic classic children's songs. But we do them in French and Spanish and German and Italian, but also Japanese, Arabic, Russian and Norwegian and Welsh. So we've got quite a big quite a big mix.

Alex G: I was going to say, you cover you cover quite a bit there. Yeah. So I'm sure we're going to get into that later. But just out of curiosity, is that just to to kind of prime the kids, to be more open for different languages, kind of raise awareness at an early age of, hey, there is a lot of stuff going on out there that you don't know about yet.

Cate: Yeah. So the person I set Babel Babies up with was at university with me, so I studied English and French and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, she's now a translator as well. So she did Russian and German and she subsequently learned Arabic and I had learned Italian and Portuguese after university. So before like when we started and we had babies at the same time, this is the reason the conversation kind of came up. I said, oh, you can speak German to her, to her baby, and she wants to know if I was going to speak French. And so we were kind of tussling with those ideas. And actually, we just really wanted to introduce the boys to all the languages because we love languages. Words are great. And we were excited about passing the passion on. It wasn't so much like, can I make my baby bilingual? It was more just can I make them excited about languages and exploring the world and learning and meeting new people and having a go? Because I think I don't know how it is for you, because you're obviously from mainland Europe, from Germany and, in Britain, there's a real sort of fear, I think, with learning languages. And people just don't start necessarily at all from a from a good place. It's not you know, we speak English and it's difficult to kind of take the first steps, I think.

Alex G: Any time somebody has English as a first language, it's kind of tricky to jump into that "let's learn a language" situation because, you know, everybody speaks English. So you really have to want to learn another language because chances are you don't need to learn another language so I think it's a really smart move that you want it to kind of pass on the passion to the kids, because that's kind of the most important thing if you're I don't know, in the States, in the UK, wherever you may be.

Cate: Yeah, I think that's real. It is a real problem because, you know, like you say, everybody does seem to speak English and it's the lingua franca. Like if I went to Sweden and I wanted to talk to people, we probably meet other people who were also trying to speak English as the, you know, the language to do transactions and things like

Sarah: When growing up on the mainland, or at least for me, I travel a lot with my family always four times a year within the European continent and sometimes, of course, the German speaking countries. But the majority of the countries can travel to like nobody spoke German. So you have to find a way to communicate. And it wasn't even English most of the time either.

Cate: It was the same for me. Like we we were lucky. And we went on holiday to mainland Europe and spend lots of time in France and just, you know, it was a real thing for me. I really wanted to learn languages. But I think, you know, is is tricky. If you come through school and you don't necessarily feel that excited about the curriculum that you've been given a little bit of French, maybe a little bit of German, perhaps a bit of Spanish in secondary school. But languages are so much fun.

Sarah: I even find that tricky here. I mean, I think language learning in in school is it's often not taught that well. I mean, I love languages and obviously I learned most of them also at school, at least the base and then build on it later. But a lot of the time, the kind of secondary school kind of language learning is because it's so much about rules. Yeah. You feel like you have to learn all these vocabulary like and then all these words and then all these grammar is just a bunch of rules and it's boring. You know, you don't really see the fun and what it gives you. And when you really go to a country and connect with people, that later outcome that you get. And yeah, it's it's a real shame because if somebody only realized in university, I think I said before on the podcast, but one of my linguistics teachers, she once asked us in class, what is grammar? And everyone was like, oh, that's a bunch of rules, blah. And she was like, no, it's that way the way humans make sense of the world. So it's like we describe relationships between things. That is a grammar that we have, like an understanding of this grammar. We but we associate that we just with this these rigid rules you have to learn. But really, that's that's just the byproduct of it.

Alex G: That's a nice way of looking at it though.

Sarah: It's like if you see a bird flying from a tree to a house, you go like, oh, this thing goes from here to there. And you have to find a way to explain these relationships between things. Right. So that's the most basic way of thinking about it. And of course, I know it gets more complex, but I love that that if I could really it's something so simple just opened my mind to this.

Cate: I think it's a really interesting topic. Grammar gets people's hackles up, as we say. So, you know, it could be a bit of a love hate relationship is actually is a really, really fascinating subject. And I think it's a bit of a kind of it's a red herring, really, to think of it as rules because grammar rules in inverted commas, they just describe what people do. So it's what people do with language. That is the the thing that is interesting right now, it's language. Language. As one of my podcast guests Michael Rosen said, language is always language in use. It doesn't exist outside of people using, it doesn't exist without people using it. So you're you're looking at what people actually do with language. And it's very active and it's very exciting and dynamic. But if you kind of go into a very abstract kind of naming of parts type of grammar quite early on, you you know, it feels like language is something that is done to you rather than you being in control then. So I think maybe, you know, if you if you can put children and also with people, babies who are trying to give parents that confidence as well to be in the driving seat and, you know, enjoy being in control of language, like where are you going to with it? Rather than, you know, trying to learn abstract rules, which doesn't feel very connected to what you actually want to it. What do you actually want to do with language? Language is cool. I love language. This is the main the main thing you need to know about me.

Alex G: We should do a quick bingo.

Sarah: Could be a drinking game. Every time you hear the word language, you do a shot.

Alex G: Exactly. Please only listen to this episode on a Friday evening.

Sarah: But I love what you said about, you know, it's always that the language lives, and here in Germany, for example, for many years now, people have had debates about, you know, the Anglicisms and Americanisms that come into the German language. And it's like turning the German language, blah, blah, blah. And actually, the people that I found most relaxed about this were all the linguists, like the proper professors at the university that teach linguistics because they're like, yeah, this is happening to languages because language lives you know the so they were not so you would expect those ones might be the ones with most tightly grab on to language, but they were like the most chill about it because they're like, well, this happened before and this is a part of life and language lives. And this is just what people do. We all communicate. And that's that's the goal.

Cate: Absolutely. In English, if you go back, say, 400 years, English was just a bit of a, I would say useless language if you weren't in England, you know, you couldn't go past kind of Dover as someone I was talking to on the Language Revolution podcast. John Gallagher is an early modern historian and he's looked at language education and he's got this fantastic quote from a translator and language teacher for like fifteen seventy eight, I think. So John Florio said English will serve you really well if you're in England. But if you go past Dover, you know, it's worth nothing because nobody spoke English outside. And then there was this real creative, exciting period where English borrowed loads and loads of words from Italian and French and Latin and obviously already had Germanic roots. And people were quite anxious that English was boring too many words and that it was just this mongrel language that wasn't really anything because it borrowed so much from other languages. I always think of it as kind of Norwegian and German and French and Latin, all standing on top of each other with a raincoat on pretending.

Sarah: I think I've seen a comic strip like that before.

Cate: Yeah, pretending to be a grown up language that we really are a language.

Sarah: But I think that's almost fair to say about many languages because like, I was going to say every language, but because I'm not confident in saying I want to say what most languages or many languages it's like in German as well. We've had the influence of the Latin language long time ago, of course, and French, English, lots of English now and probably more small ones in between and now, of course, through immigration as well. There's more languages coming in again. And so but this is something that's also so great about languages, right? Because you can always see the influences of the times. You see what happened in history also through the development of language, because it's again, it's people coming into contact with each other.

Cate: Exactly, it is people that's the thing is language doesn't exist without people. And so people come into contact with each other and they need to trade. They need to make friends and have interesting conversations. And so if there isn't a word in language but language B is. Got it. Well, obviously, you would just you know, the main goal is the conversation, right. Is the you know, the kind of talking to each other. And nobody's really thinking strict boundaries must exist in this conversation, in my language, because really, if you want to have a nice conversation, you're trying to just keep the flow going on and say, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. I think some of the anxiety about word borrowing is not really that not really that useful because language of language is always borrowed from each other. That's just what people people do because it's very pragmatic and normal.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And something you touched upon earlier that already before we asked specifically about your features and all that, but something I thought was interesting as well as about child language acquisition and that people are afraid often if they learn two languages, maybe they learn only one language properly, you'd think that's kind of outdated. But at the same time, I know so many examples of like friends of mine as well who have parents from two language backgrounds. But when they got scared that maybe they don't learn the language where they live properly, so then they gave up the other language or just, you know, used it sporadically. So even though they technically could have grown up in a bilingual household, they didn't fully grow up bilingual. So one of my best friends, you know, she had to improve like like her mom was from Guatemala and her dad is German and she grew up with German as a native language. And she also knew and understood Spanish, but not to the same degree by far. And she caught up on it later in life now. But it was also out of a fear that maybe she wouldn't learn German properly enough then to, you know, that she might fall behind in school because of that. And she's not the only one. I know a lot of people like that. And yeah, I mean, we technically know that this is outdated. But even now, like my my daughter, you know, like my my husband is Irish and know speaks English, I speak German. And even then people are like, are you sure she's going to be OK if you speak language like she's going to be fine, you know, but people are still worried about this kind of stuff that you don't learn the language properly

Cate: It is one of the biggest myths, I think, that goes round about bilingual children, that they will be confused if they hear more than one language. And it's kind of it's kind of come from some bad science, basically. So there were some studies probably a hundred years ago now, like the 1920s, people were getting really interested in bilingualism and, you know, doing studies where they measured how many words the children had. And I think one of the studies they took a Spanish English bilingual. So they measured how many English words the children had. And they concluded that the bilingual children had half the number of words, but they had completely ignored the fact that they also knew some Spanish words. OK, so this unfortunately, you know, even though the science was terrible, the kind of the results of that kind of carried on going round and round. And what I'm learning from getting more into science is that it's very difficult to get the right messages out, but it seems to be very easy to get the wrong messages out and then quite difficult to put them back in their box because, you know, because a catchy story or a sensational headline or something that will catch people's attention and then even one hundred years later, people might still be correcting it. But essentially, it's wrong to think that children will be confused. And actually that comes from a monolingual perspective because, you know, children who grow up with two languages, they're not confused, as is normal for their, you know, their environment. OK, and, you know, all all the first language acquisition research shows that children are not confused. And they even from before birth, they're beginning to categorize the fact that there are two languages in their environment at birth, like babies who were hours old, have shown, you know, ability to kind of distinguish between two languages that they know, say, like English and Tagalog. They can separate the sounds. They're not confused them, and they can show a preference for both to make sure that they recognize that they both the different languages, but they also they both matter. Whereas babies who have not heard those two languages will only recognize the English and show preference for English, and they will not see Tagalog as a valid, like a linguistic sound as opposed to just a normal noise, you know, like a bell ringing or something like that. So, so, so, so, yeah. So they don't kind of categorize that as a oh, this is something I need to pay attention to because this signifies language is bilingual babies. They already know that these languages. Sounds are in their experience and they're going to need to know them because their caregivers know them. And, you know, this is incredible, right? So, like from...

Alex G: That *is* indcredible!

Cate: From before birth, you know, babies are gearing up to absorb and abuse the word absorb, which I, you know, come back to in a minute because it's really misleading. Actually, babies aren't just absorbing. They're not sponges. They're really active, incredible scientists, you know, like doing kind of tests all the time, like, is this useful? This is not useful. Do I need to know this is a really active process, learning a language, and then you kind of gradually start to specialize by the time you're like 10 to 12 months old. If you are exposed to two language systems, like two sound systems, you kind of keep the channels open if you like to hear and to make the difference between the two languages. Even languages are really close together. So like Spanish and Catalan, and there are very subtle differences in the vowels. You know, Catalan has got some vowels that don't exist in Spanish and they are so similar to the Spanish. One year old can't hear the difference between the two Catalan vowels, but a Catalan and a Spanish Catalan baby can hear the difference between these tiny, tiny differences. Differences in. It's incredible, really. It's it's like really subtle. And yeah, it feels kind of like magic almost, that babies can do it. But it's just it's very, very, very wonderful, isn't it?

Alex G: So how is this research being conducted? Because it is completely fascinating and it is actually quite yeah. It's almost like magic that that babies can do this at that early age. But like, how is the research actually being conducted? Like, how do we know the Spanish baby can't differentiate, but the Catalan baby, Catalan Spanish baby could.

Cate: So obviously you can't ask a four month old baby,

Alex G: It'll answer back in Portuguese.

Cate: Yeah. So the scientists, the linguists, they've got these incredible techniques. So this one called a high amplitude sucking technique. So HAS has and it's like a dummy and it's got sensors in the dummy and baby baby show preference by sucking harder on the dummy. So like the like, oh, I know this language. I like this. I'm going to keep sucking. 

Sarah: They get excited.

Cate: And so. Yeah, yeah. And what they do is they habituate the baby to one of the languages. So say if it was English and Tagalog you would keep playing them sounds which are in English and then the baby obviously gets used to it so they suck less and less like it's new and exciting. And then they will introduce the next language. And if a baby notices the difference, they'll start sucking harder on the dummy again because they've noticed the change. Where is the baby who doesn't notice? The change is still good, essentially. So they keep sucking, doesn't increase. Does that make sense? So like, if you notice that this new sound indicates a new thing, you will go, oh, that's interesting. And you'll suck harder on the dummy if you don't notice the difference because you are not exposed to it. For example, it's not something that you recognize as a new sound system. Then you don't suck so hard. And then older babies, they do a looking test as well so they can play on different computer screens. And so a baby will look over in one direction and then they get used to looking in that direction for certain association with words, word or with a set of sounds. And then if the sound changes, they might look in the other direction. If they don't notice, if they don't notice a change, then they continue to look in the same direction. So it is incredibly clever. And there's this incredible lab

Alex G: That is crazy, yeah.

Cate: Yeah. It's really fascinating.

Sarah: And it is crazy to to see, like, my daughter is only six months old now and I can also already I mean, I'm not doing any tests with her, but I can I, you know, for example, ask, are you hungry, you know, you want to eat something and then I can see you are getting excited, you know, like even if we're nowhere near where the bottles are or whatever food, you know, and she's like getting excited like this every time when I ask her and then when I speak to her in German and of course my husband does the same thing also. But in English, she also has this reaction. And again, we're not like near the food so that you think, OK, it's just because she's seeing the food, she's getting excited. But this is fairly recent. But I was surprised to see that she's already able to pick up on these small things now, not not for many things or anything, but I can, you know, ask her, like all of us coming home and

Alex G: the basics. 

Sarah: She knows the word papa and, you know, and it's like that. So he's coming home. And it's really cool to see that she's she's so young. But she can I can tell she's starting to recognize things like this already now.

Cate: Yeah, absolutely. So babies, they they first of all, they develop that we call it Receptive vocabulary. So it's like the language that they understand. So their comprehensive vocabulary and then obviously later then they start producing the words, but before you know it, that's the kind of it feels like the tip of the iceberg. By the time baby starts speaking and consistently speaking, it's sort of around age two. But they've done an awful lot of work before then, haven't they, before they actually say papa and they mean papa. They don't just make the sound without associating it with papa. And so by the time babies are actually meaningfully produced a word, they've done a lot of work and it can go unnoticed. I always think it's really fascinating to compare talking with walking. So obviously your baby will be pushing up and starting to do tummy rolls and holding her neck up and getting stronger and then maybe starting to crawl. And it's really visible, isn't it? Like you can see all the different stages. And as a parent, I feel like we can support that really easily because it's there to see. And then when they get a bit older, you can hold their you know, you can hold your fingers out and help them walk. And, you know, it's very easy to scaffold that as a parent and to help them walk and give them a little trolley and then they can push the trolley along. But with talking, it's like if you don't know what's happening, you might not think anything is happening until they say Papa

Alex G: Very true.

Cate: You know, and it's suddenly like, boom, there it is. Language bang is disappeared. Whereas actually language is exactly the same as walking. And it comes in all these tiny, tiny, tiny, incremental stages. And it involves not one skill, but like a whole kind of network of skills. The baby develops at different times and at different rates. And obviously every baby is different. Like every person is different. They have you know, they do things in different stages, like roughly along the same track. But, you know, obviously they've got individual differences. So it's it's amazing when they say the first thing they've already learned how to understand a lot of words before that. So I think by six, six to eight months, they might even be coming up to sort of fifty words. They understand already.

Alex G: Their glossary is expanding.

Sarah: That's pretty cool. Yeah. And you could it's really hard for us. I remember also the a few months ago she started doing like back and forth with us, like with kind of blowing air out her lips, like, I don't know, like that and making different sounds. And we would do them back and forth with her. And she was like responding to our sounds. And we had like little conversations that way with her, which was really cool. And yeah. Picking up on your I loved your comparison with the talking and walking because it again brings me back to my university days. We watched a video there and I think it was in relation to, you know, Noam Chomsky, his theory of universal grammar, that grammar, like an understanding of grammar, is inborn. And they tested it in comparison also with babies that like stepping is inborn. But you need to learn the balance. And so they compare to what language? I don't know the exact comparison anymore, but somehow that, like the basic understanding of grammar, is inborn. But then, of course, you have to learn the specifics of your language and the sounds and everything. There's a lot to learn, but I thought there was a really nice comparison there as well.

Cate: I think it's quite interesting because parents I've spoken to have quite often felt a bit disempowered, that they don't know how to help their baby learn how to speak. And it's so funny because what you just said about your family kind of doing the blowing bubbles and it's a conversation. I mean, obviously your baby's not saying, hey, mom, let's blow bubbles, but she's instigated a conversation with you and you have responded. And that is the vital thing, is that babies, they need that conversational interaction. And it's a very social thing. She's eliciting care from you, from the from birthweight babies. You know, they've got big eyes and they're all gorgeous and probably they look a bit like their father as well. So keeping the dad in the loop and creating creating a bond, you know, is all is all very kind of, you know, it's all very evolutionarily sort of there to create care and nurture, isn't it? And then those first sounds and all of that, it's like a back and forth conversation, even even when they are just hours old, it's incredible. And then by the time they're six months old, they're quite an expert at getting you to respond. And there's lots of memes, I've seen, you know, about the baby in the house who is the boss. Even when they're small, they can make their parents drop everything and come running to do what they need right now. But conversationally is really fun. It's really interesting. And they start to learn how to play peep-oh and stuff like that. You know, like if you hide behind your hands, jump out. And then there's all the fits of giggles. And that kind of thing is really gets a response from the parents. And then the baby loves that. So they say, oh, great, let's do more of that. And then it kind of keeps going and

Alex G: Such attention seekers!

Sarah: It's so much fun, though, exactly what we're doing most of our day, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex G: But I have a question. I'm not sure if there's like a like a specific answer or any research on it, but I actually watched a YouTube video the other day, which we all know this is highly scientific, surely, and very well researched. But somebody was saying that it's better if you, like, talk to your baby like a proper human being instead of doing like all the googoo gaga stuff, which, you know, you can still do, and also like the blowing bubbles because, of course, it's fun and it makes me giggle and you have a lot of fun with it. But then generally speaking, like, you should just talk to the baby, like you talk to a person. Is there anything on that? I don't know.

Cate: Yeah. So if you look at how parents talk to their babies, they quite often elongate their sounds. They like Halo. And, you know, you've got these kind of like really sing-song very kind of cadenced melodies, if you like. So that seems to be like quite a natural instinct. I know. I certainly find myself doing it with my children. I was like, oh, where did this come from? You know, it just sort of comes out. So we do we do infant directed speech, as I think it's quite a natural thing that parents do. And actually, from what I understand from my reading, is that babies can then learn, because if you think about speech, it hasn't got any gaps between words. You know, it's called the speech stream because you can't tell where one word ends and when word begins like it. You know, we were all transported now into into a country with the language. We didn't know we wouldn't know where the beginning and end words were. Right. It's just one long, constant kind of outpouring. And it's called the speech. Yeah. So babies, they can be helped by this kind of singsongy up and down cadenced sort of style, if you like talking, because it helps them to work out. And segment is the technical term, helps them segment the speech stream and begin to work out oh, where the beginnings and ends of words are. So actually if you just talk in your normal adult way to children, that really helps them because that's what they've got to learn when they're older. They've got to learn how to break language down. But it's also it's not at all harmful, I don't think, to say that a banana is another instead of something else. So and I think I think parents would just naturally do a bit of a mixture. I think if you only, you know, I don't know any studies where someone has only spoken to their child in I'm going to call it baby language, but that's not the right kind of technical term. But, you know, with words which are just made up of children like infantilizes language or something I've not seen any studies about. But I think if we just have a smattering, like you might say, oh, look, there's the Nina for the fire engine or something, that's just normal and I think kind of onomatopoeic as well. So like I think parents instinctively, whether they know it or not, are trying to make the form and the meaning linked together for the children. So they so they start to associate things together. So but actually babies are completely brilliant at picking up the rhythm and the melody, if you like how adults talk even when they crying babies reflect back the patterns of adult speech, so this is really cool research in Würzburg in Germany. Kathleen Wermke and she's got a melody theory about crying. So babies who are German, well exposed to German, they cry with a falling melody, like in German, the sun goes down, whereas it goes up and it has a rising intonation in French and I think in English as well. And babies cries for that. And so babies who are exposed to two languages, they actually have two different melodic kind of cries. So it's incredible that even crying

Alex G: That is a lot. That is a lot. That is super cool, but so, Cate, I want to piggyback onto something that you said earlier, saying the babies don't just absorb stuff. And I think, you know, the word sponge, language sponge gets kind of thrown around a lot. And I'm sure you have opinions...

Sarah: Like little supercomputers.

Cate: It's just something that people say, like it's intuitive to think that babies are sponges. Is that because, you know, they're just a little bundle of baby ness, you know, and they you know, one day they suddenly start speaking and people think, wow, they've just absorbed so much language in the last, you know, six to eight months or a year or whatever. So it's like it's received wisdom, but it's actually a bit problematic to think of babies as sponges. So for all the reasons I've already said, babies are really active in the process. Like they are not just absorbing. They are, in fact kind of doing statistical analyzes all the time, you know, and. Yeah, you know, like by the time they're sort of 12 months old, if they don't hear Tagalog, they're going to start to be less receptive to those sounds. And if you look at it like Mandarin babies or Japanese is a great example, you learn in Japanese is not a different sound. It's actually part of the same sound block. But in English it's very different. You have L and R, le and re is distinguishable to different sounds and we use them differently. But a baby who's exposed to English and Japanese, they maintain those two sound systems, whereas an adult Japanese speaker finds it very difficult to hear the difference because they're not they're not they're not distinguishable in Japanese as two different sounds anyway. So if you think of a baby as a sponge, you're kind of missing. They're very active role that they are actively doing stuff all the time. They're not just absorbing language. It is actually something that is acted as a process is very dynamic. And also it can lead to problems in terms of, you know, giving the right support children. If you if you think that they're just like a sponge and they're not doing anything, you might be missing some of the signs where they might need help. Or, you know, if you quite often like, it's popular now, isn't it, to put young children and increasingly younger children into, like, sort of bilingual daycare or, you know, say, oh, great, just pop the baby in a in a French nursery and bingo, they'll learn French, you know, no problem. They're a sponge, which is actually babies are humans and they all have different needs. And they may find that terrifying to be plopped into a nursery where they don't speak the language. They might they may actively dislike it. You know, it's not just that all babies are the same and they're just sponges. You've got to take an individual, you know, personality. They may have different aptitudes. They may have different attitudes as well. So I think the idea of sponge is is just misleading. And, you know, there's a group of us who are trying to kind of campaign against using the word sponge because it's it's not it's not really helpful, I think, in terms of supporting children as they learn. Mm.

Sarah: And I remember as well, again, from from college from that when I was when we were taught about child language acquisition and the different theories out there, that one of the points one of the teachers was making also is that sometimes when you that in the beginning maybe children are mimicking a bit more and then they you know, that changes again. And I forgot all the different stages in the names, but I remember distinctively that in the beginning then sometimes maybe a child says something correctly, like I went and then they learn the the rule that, you know, they have like the eddy ending for past tense. And then they play around with that rule and then they start to make, you know, mistakes and putting them in air quotes here because they're trying out this rule. They might say "I goed" or "I wented" and then they. But it's not actually a sign of a mistake so much as it's a sign that they're developing. And they're like you said, they're actively trying to figure out this language and they have a new rule. So they're trying to apply it to everything. And then they kind of see what sticks and they come back. And it's a it's a positive development, even though it sounds to the adults as something wrong first.

Exactly. It sounds like a backward step, doesn't it? So what happens is you've got, as you say, a U-shaped curve is really typical development. A baby will kind of learn chunks of language that are unanalyzed so they don't know about grammatical morphological endings and that kind of thing. They kind of hear went and they may use went early. You know, that might be one of the things like, oh, daddy went or something, you know, and then as they get a bit more kind of awareness of, like, morphological endings. So -ed or -s that in English, for example, there's not that many morphological endings. We have s on plurals and we have S on third person and we have Ed on past sentences. So there's not that many to learn and they may well then start overgeneralizing and say, I went to the park because they say I played and they hear Ed and it's more common to have verbs that end in Ed than it is to have irregular verbs. So, you know, they will see that. And because they're doing this sort of statistical analysis of a frequency and that that's the thing. There's loads of really cool science looking into this. And children can then overgeneralize and it looks like they've gone backwards, but they haven't. They've actually just started to acquire morphological awareness and then gradually evens out and they may be gone from a three four. So easily have figured out that, you know, irregulars don't take the ending and that Regulus do not. Obviously, they haven't overtly said that to themselves. They don't know irregular and make

Sarah: sure. But they understand it on that level.

Cate: Usage wise, they kind of fit more what we would expect from an adult's language, and it's also is systematic. It's not it's not just random error is actually systematic. And I think if you if you look at child children's errors, if they're like random and unsystematic, that's maybe more of a warning sign than if it's systematic and following a pattern. It's just part of the process. It will come out in the wash eventually.

Sarah: Yeah. And something and I don't know if we can verify that or if there are things you know about this? I'm pretty sure I remember something else where we were taught that maybe it's just in some cases or not always, that it's sometimes, at least for the learning development that pretty much almost can't like just correct a child like there was. I remember a specific scenario that was transcribed, a conversation between a dad and a child. I don't know the age of the child anymore, but the child said something wrong, like it was like at dinnertime, they wanted the spoon and it said something like me, one spoon or something. I don't remember the sentence, but it was wrong like that. It's a really famous it's really OK. Yeah. And the dad just kept saying, like, I want the spoon and it kept going back and forth. And eventually the child was frustrated. And as I said, I want the spoon. And then it made the dad happy and he was crying, help me with one spoon. It went back to his original request of like, can I please have the damn spoon? Know the way I asked. And instantly, though, it just said the right thing. Then to me, the dad happy but went back to like, well, this is what I want to say. But also

Alex G: that tracks with a lot of children that I know. Yeah

Cate: I think it's really, really interesting, isn't it? But there is a kind of a standard like path that you walk, you go along to learn language and you can't really rush the stages. You can't kind of skip in first language. And if I'm remembering correctly, second language people, scientists have try to see, can you jump off stage like any can you maybe speed up the second language acquisition process, for example? Because that would be really useful, wouldn't it? Like if we could say we can take out these bits where you dangling in the abyss and we we can just speed you up and you can learn Arabic in six months. No problem. That would be fantastic. And it would also be very marketable. However, it's really difficult to speed up. And and so a lot of the studies I've read people learning English, because that's a really common second language. It's in a lot of a lot of the science and people from all different backgrounds, from all different ages, they go along the same kind of path with making the same sort of errors in the same sort of order. And it's difficult to kind of speed those up. So and first language, like you're saying about the child conversation with the spoon me once the child knew what they were saying, that was their developmental readiness. That's what they were saying. And the dad saying, oh, come on, tell me I want the spoon or, you know, please, could you pass between the child could maybe repeat that. Like I was saying, they might have that ability to repeat it. They're brilliant at frost mapping. It's school. What they can learn a new word like my teacher gave us the example of portcullis. You know, you're in a castle, you see the gate and you say, oh, look, there's a portcullis. And they can start using words straightaway, but they haven't really got that deep understanding of it because it takes several, you know, even like ten, eleven exposures to words really get it in different contexts. And, you know, it's it's a kind of a 360 thing, learning a word. It's not just like, see it, repeat it and then you've got it. You know, that is it's a bit more in depth than that. But you could you could get a child to repeat something. But that doesn't mean that they've been brought into that deeply kind of rooted understanding and noticed it and being aware of it and got it in in 360. You know, that will still take time. And you can't really trick it. It just has to go along.

Sarah: Yeah. And that kind of is a just a great example of how they're not just, you know, sponges who or like little parrots who repeat, but that there is an active process, like you said, that they're deciphering this and they're working on it.

Cate: Yeah, they're not they're not parrots

Alex G: I just had to giggle to myself. Because when you were saying, you know, if somebody learns Arabic, usually you find that a lot of people make the same sort of mistakes as they're learning the language. And the same happened to me when I was doing my Italian class and I kept making the same mistake. And I'm like, I don't know why I always say it like that. I know it's wrong, but I always say like that. And I telling teachers, because, like you're German, you all say it like that. And I'm like, oh, OK. So it seems it's like one of those things. But I had to laugh. So that tracks.

Sarah: But it's true. This is something also that at least one second language learning and I don't have a lot of stats on that, just pure anecdotal experience. But you do notice that after a while, like Germans make the same these and these same. An English, oh, banishments in English and the French do these and they sell you if you spend a lot of time with people from the same culture after a while, you realize.

Cate: So we all tend to make the same mistakes, like if we are German or English or whatever, you know, in your language. So there must be something there as well that will maybe, I assume, relating back to our own language, let's fix us up, then trips us up,

Alex G: which for interpreting is always quite, quite nice if you're interpreting someone German speaking English because you immediately understand the mistake they made, what they meant to say and how to say it correctly. And so it makes your job as a German interpreter much easier, whereas all the other booths will struggle because for them it's kind of like they have to decipher that on top of, like the accent and top of the foreign language and the content. They have to kind of like break down the mistake that the guy or the lady has made and how that could actually translate. So, yeah, those things definitely. It's true. Yeah.

Cate: Yeah. If you're interested, you can look into cross linguistic influences because that's really that's really, really interesting. But actually, like if somebody is learning English, I think from any different language background, there are some general kind of typical errors that they'll make. Like, you know, everybody kind of does the negation by quitting not go, then put the note in front of the verb first and then they'll gradually start to analyze it properly and say, you know, put it in the right place back.

Cate: And looking again at bilingual children who are learning French and English, you've got children who are learning negation in French and also in English, and they will learn at the same speed as the French contemporaries. So in French, you learn negation just a little bit earlier than English. And in English is by the time you're about three that you start to get it right. And they say French and English bilingual child will actually learn French negation at the same speed as French children and English negation at the same speed as English children. And it's really cool, even if they've already learned the French way of doing it doesn't sort of speed up the English way of doing it very much from. That's fascinating. Yeah, it's really it's really cool. But I mean, I would recommend looking at about cross linguistic influence because that's a really hot topic in language acquisition. It's really interesting.

Sarah: Yeah. It's going on my list. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Actually. And something else I so I think it's there are also studies done and I think one of the nicest kind, but that's the kind of show that it's also pretty much impossible to keep a child from learning a language, a way of communicating so that there's always a way that us humans so we find a way to communicate and make something into a language. You know, when you have like this, I don't want to go off topic too much. But just so you know, like, for example, children who are turning a pidgin into a creole or, you know, or just if they're very like, I don't know, confined and I'm not in touch with people, that they still managed to learn a fully fledged language later or develop one then if that's not fully available, they make it into one. I think that is so cool as well, that for us humans is just basically impossible not to communicate.

Cate: Well, I mean I mean, the studies that have sort of come into existence of children who've been deliberately deprived of language like this. A famous case of Jeannie. I don't know if you heard of her. She was that thing. That was a horrible case, a really horrible, really tragic case of a girl who was kept in the basement and nobody was allowed to talk to her. And I think she was about 13 when she was finally kind of released. And then, you know, people tried to teach her how to speak. But, you know, we you can't assume that she was too old to learn how to speak because we don't know what kind of, you know, other factors were influencing her language. And obviously, she'd had a terrible history of abuse. So, you know, you can't you can't generalize from the Jeany case. That's it. It just you know, that's really, really sad. But you've got other examples, like the Nicaraguan orphanage where you've got children who are deaf and they hadn't been exposed to sign language, but they actually kind of created their own language in their community. And then the second generation of kids coming in, they turned back into a fully fledged language. And you really can't stop children, I think, communicating if you're in the right conditions. And compared to compared to Jeannine, it is I remember in the 90s, do you remember the Romanian orphan to sort of big, big famous case of children who had been neglected and just left in cots and not really exposed to language and actually because they had each other and I don't know enough about this to talk about it properly, scientifically, but because they had each other, they actually did communicate better. Then if they have been completely isolated, so yeah,

Sarah: Yeah, and first of all, I think for the comment about the deaf children, I just recently did a study on American Sign Language interpreting and spoke to some well, I communicated with some deaf people through the help of interpreters as well. And they were saying the same to me as well, that it's not too uncommon actually that a lot of deaf children don't grow up with proper sign language education. And then if they're in remote places that kind of make up their own system a little bit. So I think that's in that community, not even that uncommon even today and even in developed nations as well. And then the other thing, what you mentioned with then that the children born into that situation, they make it into a fully fledged language that is also like in the similar to the case where in spoken languages as well. Right. When you have a pigeon first language first, that's very rudimentary. But then if a child is born in that context, they make it into a full language. So I think that's also fascinating that they become like the language machine then and they make it into a real language.

Cate: Do you know the example of the gumboot language as well? Where during apartheid the I think it was the miners were forbidden from speaking, but they created the kind of signaling rhythmical system by stamping and tapping and created basically a language through the roots. And now, you know, you can't you can't stop people from communicating so that life finds a way. It's just what humans do. Humans talk.

Sarah: Yeah, we're talkers.

Alex G: Very true. And speaking of talking, Kate, you don't only do the student only have the Babel kids. You also have a podcast, right? I think you mentioned it before. So what is that about?

Cate: So it's called The Language Revolution. And the subtitle is talking about talking, which, as you can guess, I'm really passionate about it kind of grew out of all the questions that I have about language and how humans do it. And through running Babel Babies for ten years, I met lots of adults who we all have the same questions that we didn't know where to find the answers. So I thought I would use some of my time, you know, to get in touch with experts who could shed light on it. And so I've talked to neuroscientists and Thomas Bak, who's a neuroscientist to Edinburgh about where does language go in your brain? This is a question I find really interesting. You know, you just do we have, like, little compartments in there. At the time I made the podcast, I knew absolutely nothing about how our brains process language. That was really very interesting. And the answer is no, we do not have a chest of drawers in our brain. It's more like a network and it's increasing. Every time you learn new stuff, you just add more to this network. It's absolutely brilliant. It's kind of almost an infinite amount of space, the language. And then I talk to David Crystal and a Professor Crystal, who is obviously the godfather of linguistics and absolutely wonderful and lots of different guests about language acquisition and bilingualism. And in fact, today I released an episode with a historian who John Galligan, who I mentioned, and that's looking at language in Elizabethan England. And what did people learn? How to order two beers in 1570 when they were learning French. So, yeah, I just find the whole topic really, really interesting. So the podcast has been a real chance to kind of scratch a few of those itches and talk to people who are kind of deeply interesting people. I've been very lucky. It's really interesting. It's just it's just sort of something I'm doing on the side

Alex G: just to keep yourself busy.

Cate: Yeah. Just because I think if I have a question, I like to point out the answer.

Alex G: Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. You're doing a lot, it seems. Right. And then on top of everything else, you're doing the PhD,

Cate: I'm about to start hopefully about to start. So I'm currently doing my masters here and I've got a place to do which I'm really excited about. It's about singing. So this is sort of grown out of my work with Babel Babies, because it was instinctive to me as a new parent to sing to my baby. And in fact, I remember sort of walking up and down in the middle of the night singing songs I hadn't heard since I was a child. And they all just came out. I needed to get this baby to sing and suddenly I could sing all these songs. I just didn't know. I knew they were completely buried. And then Babel Babies, I have taught, you know, a few thousand families now songs in different languages. And a lot of people say, oh, you know, I'm terrible at learning languages, I'm awful at French. But I remember "Frère Jacques" and they don't know why.

Alex G: Oh, yeah, that's right.

Cate: And it's become a bit of a thing that everybody knows "Frère Jacques" even if they haven't heard it since they were six and and then having done baby babies for 10 years now, I've seen people come with their children and they're really ready, and then the children go to school and the parents then come back with the second or third child and they say, I haven't done this for years. But suddenly after one session, they remember all the words of all of the songs and they're always absolutely amazed how much they can remember. So I'm hoping Alex and Sarah in the PhD to look at exactly what is it that songs do. How do they help us learn language? Or is it is it something to do with helping us learn the words or helping us remember the words for longer? And I've got a hunch, you know, anecdotally, I think there's something going on with our long term memory. And music seems to be a really, really powerful tool. If you think back to how Ballards got transmitted around Europe. And ballads are always really very musical, aren't they, you've got lots of rhyming and the rhythm is very regular. And you've got a meter that is very memorable as well. So, you know something, something powerful happening there isn't there

Sarah: Maybe because there's more than one thing happening because it's connecting to different parts of the brain that that's forming a stronger bond or something like that. That's like I know like in some of the baby books right now, they're also encouraging parent, like I'm also singing to my baby and like now and it also came natural. But now it's also saying it's on the books you should sing. And ideally, you should also involve movement. And so that they have all these different things going on from a connection to to that opinion polls to encourage the speech development, but also just in general, all of the all of the developments, because I assume it's a touching on different areas in the brain maybe as well or something like that, I don't know.

Cate: Yeah. So I think from my understanding at the moment, music and language, they kind of you know, if you look at a scan of the brain as you're doing, you know, language or music, it lights up the same sort of areas. So it's quite a it's quite a holistic thing, you know, giving your whole brain a workout. So the podcast guest, I mentioned Dr Thomas Bak. He has this lovely analogy that if you go to the gym and you do lots of bicep curls, you know, that is like you doing Sudoku puzzles ok so you're practicing and you're giving your brain some exercise. And while you're doing lots and lots of bicep curls, however, if you do something, something with language or music, it's like going to the gym and using all of the machines, basically. So there's something kind of a bit more powerful happening and a bit more all round exercise for your brain. But I think with the songs. This something to do, I don't know yet, because I haven't got I haven't got deep enough into it, but there's something definitely happening with long term memory. I think, you know, if you there's some great research from California. I think Ruben is the researcher. If you play somebody a tune that they know really well, like a pop song, you know. OK, so you're playing their favorite song and you stop the music and then you start it again 10 seconds later. They have actually continued the song to exactly the same beat. And when the music starts, their brain is exactly in time. Like we've just got this incredible memory for for the rhythm of it. So I think there's something very powerful happening with the rhythm. And I know from teaching Babel Babies like I teach "Row the boat", you know the song we do. We do it in Norwegian. 

Alex G: Of course.

Cate: Of course. And Norwegian and English and German as well. Obviously, the Germanic languages, it's quite similar. And people, they don't know the words yet, but they can't actually say the words, but they know the rhythm. And then because they know that they've got these little slots that the words will go in. They often describe to me that it is easier to learn it because they already know the rhythm and the tune and everything. And then it's like the words, like the last bit that goes in like this, jigsaw puzzles where you've got wood wooden holes and you put the little pieces in, but you've actually created

Sarah: that even make sense monolingualism as well. Right. You often go along with the song again because like, you know, I don't know. It just kind of you start humming the melody and then slowly the words come back to you. And, you know, because I don't know, the melody just sticks a little easier. Yes, longer. And then you fill the slots slowly, like you said, with the with the words coming back afterwards as well.

Cate: There's a song stuck in my head phenomenon. That's another thing I'm looking into in the research. And yeah, it does seem to be something this little pockets of research happening around the world. So I'm hoping so in the Masters I'm doing at the moment, obviously I'm coming from a language education perspective. So it's really interesting that teachers use songs a lot, but there's not an awful lot of research looking at why songs are useful. We just sort of intuitively think that they are useful and let parents just kind of do it and teachers just kind of do it. But if you wanted to look at exactly why songs useful, it is very difficult to find papers that have got empirical evidence, by which I mean we've tested songs against other things like doing a story and you've actually controlled for different conditions and different participants' variables. And could you empirically say that songs do something? And here's the evidence. I don't know that you can at the moment, so I'm trying to pull together. Some at the moment is like looking at why teachers use songs. What do we believe about songs and some of that intuition, sort of like delving down into teacher beliefs and how we use them and why we use them. And then I'd love to build on that in the PhD and look at exactly what is it that we think songs do, what does the existing research literature show? And then try and build up an empirical study that we actually isolate songs as a variable and we try and teach some words and then we look at, you know, does the does the language stick around for longer? If you've done it through songs, that's one one thing that might come out of the PhD.

Sarah: That's really cool. I can't wait to see the results of that. And when I do think like the and this is obviously totally just, you know, I don't know, I thought, you know, that element of just fun plays a role also. Yeah. And it can be boring. Otherwise I'll have to memorize this. And whereas of, you know, singing a song is fun, we're at an all people who love to play games. You know a way.

Cate: Exactly. Exactly. So you've got all those affective variables as well, like the emotional side of the emotional side of it. And just from looking at the results that I've got in so far, teachers quite often say songs are just pure joy. They change the atmosphere in the classroom. You know, if students are feeling a bit fed up by the afternoon, we do some singing and then we all get back in the mood for some more learning. And, you know, there's there's lots of reasons why it might not be anything to do with language acquisition. Exactly. And obviously that remains to be seen. But it could be that songs just create the brilliant learning conditions that you need to allow learning to happen because everybody's in the right frame of mind for it so that it could well be.

Alex G: I find it very interesting because I remember when I was growing up and I started listening to a lot of English songs, you know, obviously it's kind of cool once you realize that you can figure out what the actual lyrics mean and that the song actually has proper meaning in another language. But then sometimes, obviously, you stumble over words which you don't know what they are. And so you look them up. And I actually to this very day, like if I use certain words or certain phrases in interpreting, like, it always brings back to mind that one particular song where I actually had to look it up or learn that from. And yeah, I completely agree with that because it's kind of like also. In my case, I feel like it's also kind of like that, that achievement, you know, like it's like a little victory because I figured out what it means and then I added, like, the last little puzzle piece to it, and then it all came together and started making sense. And yeah, I feel like with the songs, it's it's it's a cool thing.

Sarah: You created a memory around it to, you know.

Alex G: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and those are the words that I'll never forget, you know, like those phrases that I love to use just because I don't know, they have like some not not that they have a like a special meaning to me, but like, they I didn't just learn them from a book, you know? I mean.

Cate: Yeah, you might have created like a double edged route back into those words as well, because you remember you remember the song, but you also remember the process of how you got there and how you learned. You do got more connections.

Sarah: But, yeah, you know, songs also bring bring you back in general, you know, like your song, and suddenly you're a teenager again in your head or something or a little child or something. So they are obviously very closely connected to, like you said, Cate, as well, to our emotional side and, you know, all sort of like memory. So I don't know if they form a stronger bond, maybe in that sense for us also.

Cate: Also, you might just repeat it involuntarily. OK, so, you know, you're not deliberately trying you're not deliberately revising your homework, but if you've learned something through a tune and you get it stuck in your head, you're kind of involuntarily going over that. Right. So that's yeah. That might be another part of the equation that could be really, really. 

Alex G: You hammer it in.

Cate: Yeah. And to what extent do you kind of practice without even practicing, you know?

Sarah: Yeah, that's a very good point as well.

Cate: Yeah. Because a lot of the a lot of the research I've read this year is all about repetition. Essentially, you have to keep repeating exposure to certain, you know, new vocabulary from, you know, in different contexts and in different ways of looking at it for it to go in. So actually, if you just through learning a song, if you just sort of accidentally without really realizing it or making too much effort, end up doing lots and lots of repetitions, it could be that that is the key. So that's something I'd really like to get to the bottom of because it could be especially applicable for all of these early learners who are maybe learning English earlier and earlier around the world or in in England where I am, you know, we've started introducing languages at age seven in primary school. But I think, you know, we're not necessarily approaching it in the way that it's going to have the most positive outcomes and create a nation of language learners. And that's one of my things. That's the thing I really like to do is to help change the sort of attitudes the English people can't learn languages or that we're rubbish somehow, genetically, just because we're English. I think that's not true. It's like a national sort of auto-stereotype that we could definitely do with getting rid of.

Alex G: But you know what's really funny? This is this is very topical. And, you know, I don't want to delve too deep into that, but I think a lot of Americans also have sort of the same perception. It just so happens that, like Spanish kind of seeped into America very strongly over the last few decades. And I'm not saying that a lot of Americans necessarily speak Spanish, but then, you know, on Cinco de Mayo, when everybody kind of goes out and celebrates that culture, all of a sudden Spanish comes out of, I don't know what would remnants of your brain and all of a sudden people who you never thought that would speak Spanish all of a sudden without like there are a couple of really nice Spanish phrases. So I think I think there's something to it. I think there's definitely not genetic rubbish or whatever. I think it's just really. Yeah, people need to. They need to know how fun it can be as well. It's not just daunting,

Sarah: That's an element of just I mean, I know lots and lots more to it, but there's an element of getting over yourself. Right. Also, we all know a lot more. in the languages that we know than we can than we when we know, like for me. So I feel very embarrassed to say words in French or in Spanish that I used to speak well of it like a long time ago. And they've so faded. I feel like I don't know any of those words anymore. But I know when I'm confronted with someone or like in the situation, I have to speak French and Spanish that I like a lot. They know a lot more and a lot more coming back than would come out of me now where I don't have to use it, you know.

Alex G: Oh, for sure. And the level of Italian I can speak after a two to two glasses of wine, you wouldn't believe just because then you're not embarrassed.

Cate: There are two really cool things so quickly. The glass of wine thing. There is actually a study showing that you genuinely do get better after one glass of wine because you get rid of your inhibitions. And I think part of the kind of, you know, the Anglo fear of having a go at languages is just letting go. But, you know, getting over yourself like Sarah said and just happening. So that's kind of what Babel Babies is trying to do, decide. Come on, you're just singing Row the boat with the baby. The baby is not going to judge you. It's and it's actually fun. And then you get these really awesome, amazing smiles and you get that bonding experience with the baby. So you just let go of all of the inhibitions really a lot more easily. And then the other thing you were saying, Sarah, about how you think you've forgotten your French and your Spanish and it's kind of rusty. You remember I was saying that you've got your receptive language and then you've got your productive language. So, you know, you would understand loads and loads.

Sarah: Yeah, there's passive and active sides, right?

Cate: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly that's similar. What's different words for the same thing really. But you, you know, you get a bit of practice at it again and then you'll find that you're productive skills but it doesn't ever go away. There was this amazing study I read about Korean orphans who were adopted by Dutch families. I think they were Dutch or Danish. I got gotten off the top my head now, but the children left Korea when they were six months old to one year old. So they you know, they didn't hear Korean after that. And then they did an experiment. So when they same orphans were in their 20s, they had Korean lessons. And there was a control group of people who'd never, ever heard Korean and the Korean orphans, had not heard Korean for twenty five years, could achieve a better Korean accent. And they you know, they were basically better than in Korean, even though they'd had like six months of six months of it when they were babies. So it just it it's somewhere in there. I guess I my mind is amazing.

Sarah: It is fascinating and something you said earlier that I don't know at all appropriate to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. So try it exactly. Now, because you are saying it's important also to learn in different situations. And so I don't just have a baby, I also have a dog. Yeah. And in dog training, they also teach you that it's very important to train your dog. And I think it had at least eight different kind of situations or settings. So, you know, because to say otherwise, you have a very well trained kitchen dog. Your dog always listens very well in that one setting that it knows in the kitchen because it has associated this rule with this place. So for them to really learn it as a general rule, you have to bring them to all these different places inside and outside the house. And that's how they learn best. And yeah, so that they accept it as a general rule and for me makes sense. I mean, I don't want to compare babies and people in general just to dogs, but there is some overlap with this behaviorism, right. With the, with the, you know, associating something with an action or something like that. And that's the way it sticks in your brain when you know otherwise you can't just associated with the one situation. You have to experience something in several situations for it to really stick, right? That's. 

Cate: Yeah. So I think so. I think generally behaviorism and language acquisition is not really seen to be particularly sort of empirically sort of proven at the moment.

Sarah: I meant the behaviorism for the dogs with the you know Pavlovian thing. Yeah. Sorry.

Cate: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah you would, I guess you would associate like. So I also got a puppy last year. I think it's a lockdown down, a lockdown phenomenon. Is that to get get a baby and get a puppy.

Sarah: But I already had the dog but yeah.

Cate: And yes if you're training your dog in different situations then they're learning association. But that's kind of a little bit of a different thing to learn a language which is, you know, not just. Yeah, it's not just the behavioral response is like an actual kind of cognitive network as well.

Sarah: Yeah, I didn't mean to simplify it because of course humans do different things with language than dogs would? But it's just reminded me of it with learning in several situations. Or maybe that it's better. I'm sure the underlying process is different.

Cate: Yeah. You start to see the words that you and if you see them in different situations, you're kind of looking at it in the round from different angles. And, you know, you can hear it in different sentence constructions or from different people as well. So, yeah, that makes sense, creating a more powerful set of connections as well.

Sarah: So one last thing we also wanted to talk about here is the International Day of Multilingualism. Can you tell us a little bit about that campaign?

Cate: Yeah, so this is quite exciting. Thomas Bak who I did the first podcast with on the Language Revolution. We're both really passionate about talking about multilingualism. And it's funny because we come from really, really different backgrounds. I am just an English person who grew up in the middle of the English, the English countryside, and everybody spoke English, whereas he is from Poland with Polish and German, and then he moved to England and he also speaks Spanish. And so he's super multilingual and I'm sort of passionate about it in one direction. And he's from another direction. And then with a collection of colleagues, we we decided that there were lots of really cool initiatives and lots of grassroots things happening, talking about how being multilingual is really, really normal. However, there wasn't something kind of joining it altogether. So what Thomas decided was that on the twenty seventh of March, which is the day on the Rosetta Stone, you know, with the multilingual stone, we would do the International Day of Multilingualism. And we've got a hashtag which is #multilingualisnormal, and it's basically a Twitter party that people join in and tweet examples of how multilingual they are. Or it's not just about like, you know, there's a bit of a hang up as well. That multilingual means that you are fluent in several different languages, which can feel a little bit too high a go. Whereas people like me, I'm not fluent in ten languages, but I will have a go ten, you know, ten different languages. I can sing you songs in ten languages. And most people. Yeah. And it's and it's just about kind of that open an attitude I think in in French, in European literature actually it's like plural. Gulleson is a is a is a word that gets used a bit more as well, and it's about knowing a bit of different languages. So the idea of the International Day multilingualism is just to kind of get people talking about multilingualism and plurilingusm and normalizing it. It's not you're not fully bi-. You don't have to be bilingual. Basically, it's normal to have lots of different languages in our world and in our communities and and to enjoy that as a set of skills and lots of, you know, the potential connections that we could make with other people. And over the last few years, I think it was the third year that we've run it. This year, we've reached on average that one point five million people every year. So it's really exciting. And yeah, it's had people from all the different continents tweeting about it, as we know, to this year, not Antarctica. We need to get the penguins to vote next time.

Alex G: So how does one go about establishing an international day of anything like can I can I just make it up? Today's the international day of... Cracking my fingers?

Cate: I think if you want to do something official, you need to go through UNESCO or to you know, there's an application process to make it an official one. But I think if you just have enough people joining in and we certainly did, we had a fantastic response last year, it becomes a thing of its own and actually multilingual is normal, really cool. And I made a book called Multilingualism Is Normal last year. And lots of the people who've been involved have contributed like a little snippet, just I think it was five hundred or five hundred, seven hundred words each day, something that you can read on the loo without trying to get too intellectual. But it's really interesting little insights and vignettes about people's life with languages. And and actually there are 60 different contributors and there are 60 different ways of looking at what it is to be multilingual. So I think it just shows that people all do languages in their own way and it's really cool and diverse. And that's what gets me excited about it.

Alex G: I just because, you know, the hashtag is multilingual is normal. I saw on Twitter did it and I really did want to get too political. This can easily veer off into the wrong direction. But I read somewhere that. What is her name, Kate Middleton, her daughter has now learned French, I believe, in in elementary school. And then somebody on Twitter said, well, it's fantastic that we're celebrating that she's multilingual, but millions of other children around the world are multilingual as well. Anyways, it seems that it's just impressive. It's just less impressive if you're poor or not rich. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is a very good point. But. 

Cate: It is a really important point, because actually, if you think about the UK, which is my context, we've got what is a statistic that gets bandied around three hundred and sixty four different languages in primary schools in England. But I think it's probably more like about 60 years often. But either way, we have really, really multilingual children and families. And I think it's it kind of goes a bit under under notice, doesn't it, that every day multilingualism is not necessarily celebrated, whereas you get this prestige variety of multilingualism where you've learned some French and Spanish. That's terribly nice. Whereas if you have got other languages that maybe not those prestige languages, there can be some snobbishness or some prejudice against that. And that's part of the kind of campaign as well that we're hoping to normalize multilingualism in all of its forms. So it's amazing that the Princess Charlotte, I think is a name has learned some French. That's really cool. I think she also had a Spanish nanny when she was really so maybe she remembers a bit of Spanish, and that's really wonderful. However, on the flipside, it's also absolutely brilliant that you've got children who speak Urdu and they come into school and they also speak English. And I talked to a boy who I went and did a workshop like a linguistics workshop with some 14, 16 year olds. And we did this really, really fun puzzle, like a Linguistics Olympiad type of puzzle, where I challenge them to translate an unseen text in a language that they did not know into English. And what I'd done actually, funnily, was right, baba black sheep out in Norwegian, but made it look like an exam paper. And after about 50 minutes, the children, they worked out that it was Baba black sheep and they worked out through using cognates and all that kind of thing. And then we had this really great discussion afterwards and talked about whether they had to the languages, etc.. And this boy, he said, Oh yeah, no, I speak Igbo at home with my mom and my nan and the other kids in his class. They were like, no way. We did not have a clue that you spoke a different language at home. And he said, oh, just speak it with my mom or my nan. It doesn't really count. And of course, that exactly exemplifies the point that we're making his language skills in the translation workshop, you know, that was translating and that was prestigious, et cetera. But actually, every single day he surfs between using English and they go home. And that's, you know, under celebrated. But it's equally it's just fantastic, isn't it?

Sarah: Yeah. That's such an excellent point to make, because this is also true. And not just in the U.K., of course, in so many countries would be absolutely the same in Germany as well.

Cate: Yeah,

Alex G: Yeah. I actually read this. So this is a little bit off that point. But I read that in Germany. I forgot where exactly in which particular city it was. But they had a relatively big Muslim population attending that particular high school, but they didn't actually have any Muslim classes. So they offered like Catholicism, they offered evangelical classes, as you usually do in Germany. This is quite common. But they didn't have anyone teaching anything about, you know, the Muslim faith. And what they actually did is they said, well, if you are Muslim, we're going to put on a Turkish class for you and you can all go to Turkish class as like a sort of substitute for for the religious class. And I was like, how does this make any sense? But that alone shows you that a lot of people associate certain languages with with attributes that have nothing really to do with the language. You know, they might just be completely randomly connected somewhere, somehow, but then people kind of draw their own conclusions from that. And then, you know, I don't know, I just. 

Cate: Yeah. It's possibly a hangover, isn't it, from the whole nation equals language. So the flag equals the language. And another one of my teachers, Hamermesh, is always quoting Max Weinreich. He said that, you know, the difference between a language and a dialect is a language has got an army and a navy. And it's true. You know, if you've got you know, if you've got political boundaries around languages, haven't you? They're artificial. They're not actually they're not actually boundaries. You know, you don't have lines in between like where languages meet. But like we said at the beginning of dialects. Yeah. Like we said at the beginning, you know, languages are really fluid and dynamic and it's about what people do is very natural to to mix these things. But I think, you know, there's a lack of understanding of what actually language is and how it's not just, you know, it's not just a signifier over nationality because you can be, you know, one nationality and be multilingual. You can be multinational and have lots of languages. It's a lot more dynamic than I think a lot of people think it is.

Sarah: Yeah. And actually, it's also good to remember that, you know, the standard in any language once also was just a dialect that was chosen to be the standard. Right. And then obviously that was kind of kept them preserved or whatever. Also develops a little bit, but so that dialects are no less than the standard. So. 

Cate: That's it exactly there's a really funny example of English. Got it in English. It got sort of standardized. And a famous milestone in that is Johnson writing a dictionary of English. And he said about ten years before his dictionary actually came out that he was going to write down words and the pronunciation, he was going to standardize the spelling on the pronunciation. And then in the preface to the dictionary in 1747, he said, you may as well try and lash the wind as write down the English pronunciation. It was impossible. Nobody pronounced anything the same. People would say greet and great. They meant the same thing, let them have their own pronunciation and then be like one hundred years after that, there was a big rush to try and standardize pronunciation. It's really interesting, but like the written standard of English comes from London Chancery English, like, you know, from the law courts. And and actually it doesn't reflect the diversity within English as it is, you know, huge, hugely diverse. And and I guess that's the same for other languages, too. Like I know Italian is the Florentine dialect, which is Italian, that actually,

Alex G: good God, I don't even get me started. I did my my Italian class in Florence and I was like, OK, I've got this. I'm really good at this now. And then I actually started talking to this old lady who was like a proper Florentine born and raised and was like, what language is this woman? Oh God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Cate I actually think we could probably talk to you for hours and hours on end because we have barely touched dialect. We have not even talked about accents. There's there's so much to cover. But I'm afraid looking at the time, we should probably sort of wrap this up at some point. Otherwise, you know, we're going to just turn this into like three or four episodes.

Sarah: Yeah. So I could go on that because now that we've touched upon dialect is wide open, like a whole other Pandora's box for of things I'm interested in. Yeah. That I remember and want to talk about at the cost of dragging this out for another few hours, so

Alex G: we might just have to have you back. I'm sorry. You're you're on the hook now.

Cate: Yeah, that would be brilliant. It's been really lovely to talk to you. Thank you.