Have you ever listened to a language you don’t know and thought you recognized a word—only to realize later that you were completely mistaken? Our ears play tricks on us.

A while ago, I ran a small experiment with my German students. I played them two short sentences in Czech, my native language, and asked them to transcribe what they heard. The results were fascinating.

For example, about 90% of the forty students wrote down the Czech word malí [maliː] ‘small’ as mani [maniː]. To me, this seems puzzling—there is no n in the word! But for my students, the Czech l-sound somehow resembled the German n-sound. None of the Czech speakers I consulted ever had this impression.

This little classroom experiment shows something important: we don’t all hear sounds the same way. Our ears—or better said, our brains—are tuned by the language(s) we grow up with.

Why do we hear differently?

Image 1: Oscillogram and spectrogram of the Italian words papa ‘Pope’ and pappa ‘porridge’

Long before we speak, we are already great language users. Research shows that newborn babies can already distinguish speech sounds from noises. Even more surprisingly, they are able to recognize the rhythm of their native language from a non-native one before birth.

After birth, infants are surrounded daily by an enormous amount of speech input. Step by step, they build categories for the sounds of their native language. Up until around 8 to 12 months they can distinguish nearly all of the world’s speech sounds, even those that never appear in their environment.

A Japanese baby, for example, can hear the difference between r and l just as well as American or German babies can. But this ability does not last. As children grow, their brains focus on the categories that matter in their own language and ignore the rest—like the difference between r and l. This is why many Japanese adults often find it notoriously difficult to distinguish the two consonants in languages like English. What was once easy for the baby can become very challenging for the adult.

We perceive foreign languages through native filters

Learning the sound system of a language doesn’t stop with vowels and consonants. It also includes rhythm and intonation. And even for individual sounds like a or o, it’s not only about how you articulate them but also how long you hold them. This brings us to segmental quantity, or length. It refers to the use of duration (short vs. long) of vowels or consonants to distinguish lexical meaning. Quantity shows remarkable cross-linguistic variation.

The case of long consonants in Italian

Image 2: Soundproof cabins at the Free University of Berlin (left) and University of Helsinki (right)

What feels natural in one language may not exist in another. Take Italian. It belongs to just 3.3% of the world’s languages that distinguish short from long consonants (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996).

This contrast appears in more than 1,800 Italian words, such as papa /ˈpapa/ ‘Pope’ versus pappa /ˈpapːa/ ‘porridge’ (Image 1). To be understood and to speak well, learners must get long consonants (called geminates) right—although it can be very challenging (e.g., Altmann et al. 2012).

Cross-linguistic differences in learners

In our project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language”, we examine how Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish learners acquire this feature.

The selection of these languages is not random. They all handle consonant length differently. German, for example, has no consonant length but contrasts short and long vowels in stressed syllables (e.g., Stadt [ʃtat] ‘city’ vs. Staat [ʃtaːt] ‘state’). Czech, like German, distinguishes vowel length, but unlike German, it does so in both stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., nosí [ˈnosiː] ‘(s/he) carries’ vs. nosy [ˈnosɪ] ‘noses’). Finnish is the most similar to Italian, since it has both vowel and consonant length (e.g., muta [ˈmutɑ] ‘mud’ vs. mutta [ˈmutːɑ] ‘but’). And finally, Spanish has no length contrasts at all.

This diversity allows us to test how a learner’s native language shapes the way they hear and produce length in Italian.

How good are learners at perceiving length in Italian?

In a laboratory setting (Image 2) and by means of a perception experiment, we tested and compared 20 Czech, 20 Finnish, 20 German, and 20 Spanish learners of Italian.

We used 45 short nonsense words that followed Italian spelling and sound rules but had no meaning. Each word had two versions, differing only in whether a consonant was short or long (e.g., sàpolo vs. sàppolo; milèta vs. millèta).

The words covered different consonants and stress positions and were recorded by a native Italian speaker. In every trial, participants had to answer the question: “Does the audio pair you hear belong to the same or different word?”

What we found

Image 3: Learner accuracy in perceiving Italian consonant length in comparison to native listeners

First language has great impact! Finnish learners, whose native system is closest to Italian, were the most accurate in hearing the difference between short and long consonants.

Czech learners followed, while German and Spanish learners struggled more (Image 3). Other factors also played a role. Learners heard contrasts more easily when the crucial sound appeared in stressed syllables, and some consonants were easier to notice than others.

Proficiency helped too—advanced learners did much better than beginners.

However, it is unexpected that the German group scored lower than the Spanish group—sometimes research simply surprises us!

Many factors could explain this, since every learner has their own story. Things like previous language experience, weekly study time, exposure to Italian, time spent in Italy, Italian friends, motivation, and personal talent can all play a role.

In our case, German learners had spent fewer hours per week learning Italian and had less experience studying or staying in Italy. Immersion—the experience of being surrounded by a language in real-life settings—seems a plausible factor behind their performance.

Why perception matters in language learning?

Why does pappa sometimes turn into papa in the ears of Italian learners? Because we all hear foreign languages through the features we are familiar with.

Our experiment showed that perception is difficult—but it can be improved. The key is to notice what is different and to train your ears. This means: Pronunciation training must start with perception (e.g., Colantoni et al. 2021).

In the end, learning a language is not just about new words—it’s about learning to hear differently.

References

Altmann, H.; Berger, I., & B. Braun (2012). Asymmetries in the perception of non-native consonantal and vocalic contrasts. Second Language Research 28(4), 387–413.
Colantoni, L., Escudero, P., Marrero-Aguiar, V., & J. Steele (2021). Evidence-based design principles for Spanish pronunciation teaching. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 639889.
Ladefoged, P., & I. Maddieson (1996). The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Acknowledgement

This blog post was written as part of the DFG-project “Production and perception of geminate consonants in Italian as a foreign language: Czech, Finnish, German and Spanish learners in contrast”, funded by the German Research Foundation (Project number 521229214) and executed at the Free University of Berlin. Project website: https://italiangeminates-project.com/

The National Institute of the English Language in Tehran has used the slogan “A new language is a new life” for more than 50 years

I’m preparing my lecture on “Internationalization and Multilingualism” for a language teaching conference in Bangkok later this week and I’ve been looking for a pithy proverb or quote about the joys of language learning. I’ve discovered more than I can possibly use and so am sharing some below.

The idea that learning a new language extends your horizons, makes you wiser and allows you to live your life more fully can be found in a number of intellectual traditions. This idea is based on the fact that each language is related to a particular cultural and intellectual tradition and a particular world view. As the language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”)

Obviously, one way to extend the limits of one language is to learn another one. For instance, the medieval Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who was also known as doctor mirabilis (“wonderful scholar”), described language learning as the main way to gaining wisdom:

Notitia linguarum est prima porta sapientiae. (“Knowledge of languages is the main door to wisdom.”)

A Chinese proverb makes the same point:

学一门语言，就是多一个观察世界的窗户。(“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.”)

I have not been able to discover any further information about the context of this saying and maybe one of our Chinese readers can help us out! A similar Persian proverb, for instance, has been used as the slogan of a the Tehran-based language teaching institute National Institute of the English Language (NIEL) for over 50 years and has since acquired the status of an international proverb:

یک زبان جدید یک زندگی جدید است. (“A new language is a new life.”)

There seems to be wide agreement with the idea that a new language is a new life and makes us more human. This Turkish proverb provides another example (again, further details about the context would be welcome!):

Bir dil bir insan, iki dil iki insan. (“One language, one person; two languages, two persons.”)

The first president of Czechoslovakia after WWI, Tomáš G. Masaryk, made the same point when he wrote:

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem. (“The more languages you know, the more human you are.”)

While I was looking for proverbs and sayings about the value of language learning, I also discovered a fair number of proverbs that have a more nationalistic tone and celebrate the mother tongue (whichever one it may be …) as superior to all other languages. I’m not going to reproduce any of these quotes here but will leave the last word to one of the great writers in the German language, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who argued that unless you know foreign languages you are not qualified to speak about your own language:

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von der Eigenen. (Those who don’t know foreign languages know nothing of their own.)

Do you know any other quotes or sayings about language learning and multilingualism?

Percentage of Europeans who speak three or more languages (2012 Eurobarometer ‘Europeans and their Languages’, p. 14)

The 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” was published last month and makes fascinating reading. To begin with, it’s always heartening to see the value the European Union places on linguistic and cultural diversity:

There are 23 officially recognised languages, more than 60 indigenous regional and minority languages, and many non-indigenous languages spoken by migrant communities. The EU, although it has limited influence because educational and language policies are the responsibility of individual Member States, is committed to safeguarding this linguistic diversity and promoting knowledge of languages, for reasons of cultural identity and social integration and cohesion, and because multilingual citizens are better placed to take advantage of the economic, educational and professional opportunities created by an integrated Europe. A mobile workforce is key to the competitiveness of the EU economy. (p. 2)

It is even more heartening to see that this vision is shared by the majority of Europeans: almost all Europeans (98%!) think that learning at least one foreign language is important for the future of their children. And the current generation is itself well on the way towards that goal: with 46% of the population, monolingual Europeans are now in the minority. 19% of Europeans are bilingual, 25% are trilingual and 10% speak four or more languages.

The European policy objective of a trilingual population (national language, English, another language) is already met by the majority of the population in Luxembourg (84%), the Netherlands (77%), Slovenia (67%), Malta (59%), Denmark (58%), Latvia (54%), Lithuania (52%) and Estonia (52%). By contrast, the countries furthest away from this objective include Portugal and Hungary (13% in each), the UK (14%) and Greece (15%).

Looking at where Europeans are now in terms of knowledge of languages and relating it to where they want their children to be makes me feel confidently optimistic about the future of multilingual Europe!

At the same time, not all findings of the 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” give cause for optimism, as knowledge of languages has decreased considerably in some countries vis-à-vis the 2006 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages”. The proportion of respondents able to speak at least two languages has declined considerably in these five countries:

• Slovakia (-17 percentage points to 80%)
• the Czech Republic (-12 percentage points to 49%)
• Bulgaria (-11 percentage points to 48%)
• Poland (-7 percentage points to 50%)
• Hungary (-7 percentage points to 35%)

The culprit is English

Why has bi- and multilingualism decreased so notably in these Eastern European countries when the overall European trend is towards more language learning and valuing linguistic diversity more? I knew the answer before I read the explanation of the report because I actually was part of making Eastern Europeans less multilingual at one point in my life.

As a PhD student, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, I had a job in what used to be the German Democratic Republic that involved teaching English linguistics to high school teachers of Russians who were being retrained to become high school teachers of English. This bizarre scenario was repeated across Eastern Europe: as everyone scrambled to learn English, demand for Russian and, to a lesser degree, German, plummeted. The widespread result was not bilingualism in a different combination of languages but monolingualism.

Why?

The Russian-to-English teacher re-training program on which I taught was comparatively well-resourced but even so the outcomes were not great and the fact that you can’t simply switch from one language proficiency to another was the major obstacle. Quality language teaching needs a good infrastructure including qualified and proficient teachers, resources, and practice opportunities. It is difficult if not impossible to willy-nilly transplant this infrastructure from one language to another. For instance, some of the teachers I taught had for many years organized language camps and exchanges with schools in Russia. They had no comparable contacts in an English-speaking country and so camps and exchanges went out the window. In this way many Russian language learning opportunities, big and small, were not replaced with English equivalents but disappeared.

It is the effects of the lost language learning opportunities in the 1990s in Eastern Europe that we are now seeing as statistics of declining numbers of multilinguals in the new member states. The 2012 Eurobarometer Report “Europeans and their languages” speaks of a ‘lost generation:’

Within these countries the proportions of respondents able to speak foreign languages such as Russian and German have declined notably since 2005. For example, the proportion able to speak Russian has dropped in Bulgaria (-12 points), Slovakia (-12 points), Poland (-8 points) and the Czech Republic (-7 points). Similarly, the proportions speaking German are down in the Czech Republic (-13 points), Slovakia (-10 points) and Hungary (-7 points). It is likely that in these post-Communist countries these downward shifts are the result of a ‘lost’ generation. Many of those who were able to speak German (following the Second World War) or who learnt Russian at school (it is now much less commonly taught) are now deceased, or, as time has elapsed, have forgotten how to speak these languages. (p. 16)

The global hegemony of English works in mysterious ways: not only is it closely tied to the monolingual mindset in English-speaking countries but apparently it can also result in monolingualism in Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish or Slovakian!

The lovers of English poetry among you will recall how the phrase “Betreten verboten” (“No trespassing”) encapsulates his alienation from Berlin and his longing for his English home for Rupert Brooke. Prohibition signs – signs that tell us what not to do– have become much more widespread in the century that has passed since Brooke noticed them on German lawns. This is due to a proliferation of spaces in which people who can no longer be expected to share the same set of norms congregate and circulate (airports, for instance, are a prime space where prohibition signs appear). At the same time, we also have seen a proliferation of rules and these rules often differ across spaces that even one single urban person might frequent in the course of their daily activities (e.g., the increase in smoking bans).

I have a hunch that prohibition signs are more likely to be multilingual than other types of signs (and I’m expecting that my students’ assignment will throw some light on whether that hunch bears out in Sydney’s suburbs). My hunch is based on the fact that humans often take a dim view of “the other” and tend to expect outsiders to be less compliant than insiders. As evidence for my hypothesis I have collected signs such as the one above. This hexalingual sign appears in the canteen of a Soviet-style hotel in Prague. The management of this budget hotel is clearly worried that guests might take the opportunity of the buffet-style breakfast to fill their lunchboxes, too. One thing that the sign obviously does is to mark the hotel as budget accommodation and to position its guests as cheapskates. What’s more, the language choices on the sign clearly address cheapskates of particular linguistic backgrounds. When I stayed in that hotel, most guests were Czechs, Germans and Russians, and it is entirely possible that the six languages represented are the languages of the majority of guests, and including any more languages would not have been useful (nor practical; as it is, the sign is huge).

While the language choices in the above sign in a multilingual tourist destination in the heart of Europe don’t single out a particular group as likely offenders, this sign does. I found this little flier in a hotel room in Sydney. I have a large collection of signage in Australian hotel rooms and they are mostly monolingual in English. In the minority of multilingual hotel room signage, Chinese figures rarely. This sign is thus exceptional in its bilingualism, its language choice, and even in the fact that Chinese appears above English. Clearly, someone is trying very hard to send a message to Chinese guests. When I stayed in that hotel, there were no Chinese guests present. The sign thus does double duty: not only does it alert guests to the prohibition against smoking, it also positions Chinese guests as likely offenders! The non-smoking sign below from a New Zealand train does exactly the same thing: again, we find a bilingual sign in a context dominated by monolingual signage. Again, the other language, Japanese in this case, stands out not only because of the choice itself but also because of its design (this time it’s not the position but the size and color).

Proponents of multilingualism often like to think that bi- and multilingualism per se are better than monolingualism, and that multilingual signs by their very nature are more inclusive than monolingual ones. Not so! It all depends on the context! While these signs include Chinese and Japanese readers as potential recipients of the message, they exclude them from “polite society” by singling them out as likely offenders.