300. Why Don’t We All Speak the Same Language? (Earth 2.0 Series)

There are 7,000 languages spoken on Earth. What are the costs — and benefits — of our modern-day Tower of Babel?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:11Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:51Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I don't understand.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Saya tidak paham yang kamu katakan.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Tutut leid, ich verstehe dich nicht.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Terus, Sana, pernah di kuning intindihan si Nasa Abim. Sorry, ich begreife nicht, was du sagst.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Ah, minta maaf. Saya tak paham apa yang kau katakan. Bitte sorry, I don't comprehend what you're saying.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Saya tidak mengerti apa yang kamu katakan.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  Cessungan de, bual mahen nje, mual aaradu.

• 3:16Speaker 04

  Amporo, tityang dengdeng mida.

• 3:18Speaker 06

  Désolé, je ne comprends pas ce que vous dites. I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying.

• 3:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Making yourself understood. It is one of the most defining acts of being human, and among the most important. But after all these millennia on Earth 1.0, we haven't perfected it. It almost makes you wonder if we're working through some ancient curse.

• 3:43Speaker 07

  The story of the Tower of Babel is told in the 11th chapter of Genesis.

• 3:47Speaker 08

  Whether it happened or not, it's not for me to judge.

• 3:49Speaker 07

  And it comes down to us as a myth about the origin of linguistic difference.

• 3:53Speaker 08

  But it is definitely important.

• 3:56Speaker 07

  So the project was to build a tower, and I'm quoting, "whose top may reach to heaven, and let us make a name lest we be scattered abroad on the face of the whole earth."

• 4:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  And God looks down on this and says, "See, if they can do that, there's no stopping them from whatever else they can do. So I'm gonna go down and confound all of their languages."

• 4:19Speaker 09

  That was a tale created by people for whom different languages were a problem.

• 4:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that way, they will not be able to communicate with each other and accomplish this joint task.

• 4:29Speaker 09

  They were thinking, hmm, we can't communicate with the people over the mountains, and we might want to trade with them, and we're beginning to think they might want to fight us, and we can't even have a conversation.

• 4:37Speaker 07

  I think God's revenge on the builders of Babel was to blunt our capacity to make ourselves understood and to understand.

• 4:46Speaker 09

  It is a very rich story because it depicts the multiplicity of languages as a scourge.

• 4:53Speaker 07

  So the curse of Babel is an existential condition in which we live every day.

• 4:58Speaker 08

  So this is both, you know, the blessing and the burden, the large number of languages, and the different societies dealt with it with different ways.

• 5:09Speaker 07

  We use language to communicate, but we cannot rely on it to make ourselves understood.

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  The thing that really resonates with me about the story is this sense that common language can produce common purpose, and an absence of a common language can confound that common purpose.

• 5:26Speaker 09

  Today, we hear the Babel story, and many of us have to make an adjustment because many of us think, well, OK, now there are lots and lots of languages, and so people can't communicate, and isn't that neat?

• 5:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it neat? Well, that depends on who you are, where you live, which languages you speak, and which ones you don't.

• 5:47Speaker 08

  So this is both, you know, the blessing and the burden.

• 5:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, on Freakonomics Radio, the blessings and burdens of linguistic diversity? Or, to put it more bluntly, what are the costs and benefits of our modern-day Tower of Babel?

• 6:04Speaker 09

  I find it fascinating that there are 7,000 different ways to do what we're doing right now.

• 6:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  We talk about how talking began.

• 6:13Speaker 09

  There are many, many theories as to why people started using language, and some of them are ones where you want it to be true because it's cool.

• 6:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if we could start over, what would that look like?

• 6:26Speaker 09

  The truth is that if we could start again, I don't think anybody would wish that the situation was the way it came out.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  From the WNYC Studios. This is Radio Freakonomics.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  This is Radio Freakonomics.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  The podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here is your presenter. Here is your presenter, Stephen Dubner.

• 7:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today's episode is part of a recurring series we call Earth 2.0. The idea is pretty simple. If we had a chance to reboot our planet, taking all our entrenched path-dependent systems and institutions and rebuilding them from scratch, how would they differ from how the world works today? Our first couple of episodes looked at the economy of Earth 2.0. Well, I don't think we should be spending large amounts of money inside other people's countries.

• 7:37Speaker 10

  If you don't pay attention to the people on the other end of that equation, even if you think you have the power, it doesn't work.

• 7:44Speaker 11

  An unconditional basic income, which you could pay for out of the gains from trade, right?

• 7:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, so I'm very strongly against the universal basic income. Okay, so we shouldn't be expecting a consensus, but isn't that part of the fun? With today's language experts, for instance, you wouldn't expect all of them to have the same favorite language.

• 8:05Speaker 12

  My favorite language ever is Russian. Well, I love lots and lots of languages. The French will never speak English. The Germans will never speak French.

• 8:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Among the experts we'll be speaking with, John McWhorter.

• 8:20Speaker 09

  Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Linguistics at Columbia University and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate.

• 8:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lara Boroditsky.

• 8:31Speaker 11

  I'm a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.

• 8:36Speaker 12

  Esther Shore.

• 8:37Speaker 07

  I'm a professor of English at Princeton University.

• 8:40Speaker 12

  Michael Gordon. I'm a historian of science at Princeton University. And Shlomo Weber.

• 8:46Speaker 08

  Yes, at the moment, I'm the director of the New Economic School in Moscow.

• 8:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Along the way, we learned that people who like to talk about talking, who have an intense interest in language, often come by that intensity through personal experience. For John McWhorter, it began when he was four.

• 9:05Speaker 09

  When I happened to hear a little girl speaking what I later knew was Hebrew, and the idea that she could talk to her parents in a way I couldn't understand just knocked me out. And ever since then, I've just been kind of reveling in the fact that there are 6,999 other ways to do this. And you want to know, how do they differ? Why are they different the way they are? That is what got me into language.

• 9:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  For Boroditsky, it started a bit later.

• 9:31Speaker 11

  You know, it actually started when I was a teenager. I was really argumentative as a teenager, and I loved to pick fights with people about big questions, you know, what is truth and what is justice and liberty and things like that. And what I noticed was that a lot of the arguments hinged on how we used these words. And the meanings of the words seemed to shift as the conversation went on, and different people use the words differently. And at first, I thought, if I study language, I'll be able to get to the bottom of what truth and justice and liberty really are. And then, as I started actually studying language, I learned exactly the opposite is true, that these meanings are constructed in conversation, constructed in context.

• 10:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  As for the Russian-born Weber, his interest in language came from living in many different countries. This included a stint in Canada, where he was expected to lecture in English.

• 10:26Speaker 08

  Oh, well, first of all, all my lectures were written, there was no even place for improvising. So I prepared, you know, sleepless nights, sleepless, you know, sleepless days. And then the funny, not funny, actually, very sad thing happened to me once. So I prepared the material for my lecture. The lecture was 90 minutes, but I was running out of time after 50 minutes. So the 40 minutes, I had nothing to say, you know? It was a very, you know, this experience that I will never forget. You know, I tell my children, after you overcome that, standing in front of the front of the room of 200 students, after you stand in that and overcome that, you can do many things after that. So that, you know, it was really painful, but, you know, taught me a lesson, a very good lesson.

• 11:11Speaker 08

  I will, I always came prepared after that, yeah.

• 11:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  For Shlomo Weber, it was a lesson learned. For the young John McWhorter and his Hebrew-speaking friend, the ride was just beginning. Let me ask you this: with that example from when you were four years old-

• 11:29Speaker 09

  I sobbed like a child. And I was a child.

• 11:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I could see a thought process going one of at least two ways. One would be kind of the infinite possibility, right? And how exciting that is, or maybe not infinite, but the expansive possibility. The other would be this kind of existential, you know, "Holy cow, that makes life more difficult than it needs to be." Which way did you go?

• 11:54Speaker 09

  You know, in thinking about my despair in finding out that my little Shirley spoke Hebrew, I have to peel back the layers of the onion to remember how much of a burden, what a tragedy a foreign language seemed to me at the time. I didn't like that suddenly this girl, and she and I were seeing each other to the extent that you can be having a romantic relationship at four, you know, holding hands, to the extent that she could talk in this way that I couldn't understand or produce, I was losing her. As time went on, my feelings started to be, hey, I'm gonna learn to do that. It's my Mount Everest. I'm not an athlete, but I'm a linguid, so to speak.

• 12:37Speaker 09

  But originally, yeah, it was a barrier to communication and connection. And of course, in my mind, there were maybe two languages: English and this thing called Hebrew. I didn't know how many others there were. I didn't know what the task would be.

• 12:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I'd love you to talk about the origin of language, you know, briefly.

• 12:57Speaker 09

  Oh, Stephen, it's so hard because there was no way to record it, and it happened long, long before there was any kind of writing. And so if humanity had existed for 24 hours, writing comes along at 11:06 PM. And so it was a long time ago, and there's no other species that's creating fluent, complex language now.

• 13:24Speaker 09

  There are many, many theories as to why people started using language. And some of them are ones where you want it to be true because it's cool. So there's one theory that it started with people singing and that that became language. Or there's another theory that it started because, and this is interesting. The idea is that humans are the only primates who aren't hairy enough for infants to hold on all the time because there isn't enough hair. And so you have to put the infant down while you're foraging. And so there's a theory that speech began because human women could coo at their child and keep the child calm, as opposed to if you're a chimpanzee where the child can always be up against you.

• 14:07Speaker 09

  But I think that probably started with humans needing to group together to scavenge animals dead at a distance that were too big for one human or even one little group of humans to deal with.

• 14:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Regardless of why language started and developed as it is, I would think that there would have been a large incentive for everyone to speak the same language. Because whether it's utilitarian, or gossip, or singing, or cooing to one's family, it would just seem like there's a lot less transaction cost if we're all speaking the same language. So how did it come to be and why did it come to be that so many languages bloomed?

• 14:52Speaker 09

  Language is inherently changeable, not because change is swell, but because as you use a language over time and you pass it on to new generations, brains tend to start hearing things slightly differently than they were produced. And after a while, you start producing them that way. And next thing you know, you have a new sound.

• 15:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it's telephone before there was such a thing as a telephone?

• 15:19Speaker 09

  It is exactly that. And that is as inherent to language as it is inherent for clouds to change their shapes. And so it isn't that that happens to some languages and not others. That's how human speech goes.

• 15:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is a lot of the linguistic diversity or the linguistic splintering that we're talking about largely a function of the fact that spoken came so, so, so much before written? That if there had been written, that we wouldn't have splintered?

• 15:45Speaker 09

  If writing had come along immediately, quite certainly, there would have been less change from place to place. But instead, because until really about 10 minutes ago, language was just spoken, it meant that it was allowed to change at the speed that it normally does. And that change can happen in any one of various directions, which means that once you have two human groups, then their language after a certain period of time is not going to be the language that the original group spoke, just because, say, the sound "ah" might become "eh," it might become "uh." And you can see how a language would become a new one over time. And so, next thing you know, you have thousands of languages instead of one, just because

• 16:28Speaker 09

  languages change like cloud formations.

• 16:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Given our pretty advanced development of language and communication, what are the big problems with language as it now exists?

• 16:40Speaker 09

  Well, we have 7,000 languages, and it's probably safe to say that about half of them are severely endangered. Another thing that many people would consider a bad thing is that it's a certain roughly 20 big fat languages that are eating up so many of these small ones. And what makes this regrettable to many, and quite understandably, is that the one that's having probably the most success is English. And English is just this one language that was the vehicle of a rapaciously imperial power, and now America is the main driver.

• 17:21Speaker 09

  And that language is eating up all of these other languages, and in some ways, their cultures.

• 17:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, let's take a step back here because John McWhorter has brought up a few important points. Number one, linguistic diversity has been a natural hallmark of human communication. Number two, linguistic consolidation has also been a strong trend, or maybe hegemony is a better word for it, most recently in the form of English. But in earlier centuries, there were other big, fat languages gobbling up the others, Greek and Persian and French. Sometimes, one language would come to dominate a particular domain. In Western and Central Europe, for instance, science was conducted in Latin. Michael Gordon from Princeton.

• 18:09Speaker 12

  That period of time is about 1200 to roughly 1750 is the period of time when you could expect that everybody interested in how falling bodies behave, or how the circulation of the blood works, you could expect that anybody who wanted to know about that would be able to read Latin.

• 18:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  So there are a lot of factors that may influence whether or how broadly a given language will spread. But the central conflict, it seems, the central question we should be asking about language here on Earth 1.0 is this: what is the right amount of linguistic diversity? Is 7,000 an acceptable number of languages for 7-plus billion people? Is 1 a better number? Let's think about it first on a personal level. What language or languages do you speak? What benefits do you think that confers, whether economic, cultural, or otherwise? What do you think you lose by not speaking other languages?

• 19:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how do you feel about people who do speak those other languages? Maybe you think of them as more unlike you than they actually are, solely because they speak a different language? And how much does the language you use to express your ideas and emotions influence the ideas and emotions themselves? These are obviously hard questions, maybe unanswerable, but let's start with a bit of economic analysis of language. That's what Shlomo Weber has been thinking about, at least since that stressful first lecture he gave in English.

• 19:48Speaker 08

  You know, it was a very, you know, this experience that I will never forget.

• 19:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that that makes me think about the costs of communicating in a language that you're not, that you don't have mastered. I mean, if you just think about the stress, right? The cognitive stress, literally, right? Your brain is working hard on just the language. So it can't be working on the ideas and maybe the emotional stress and physical stress. What do you think is the effect of all that?

• 20:13Speaker 08

  Oh, it's tremendous. It's actually a lot of studies on the immigration that show that emotional stress, because it's not only your own success, you care for the family.

• 20:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  To measure the costs of different people speaking different languages, researchers like Weber use a metric called linguistic distance. When it comes to trade, for instance, Weber documented that a 10% increase in the probability that two people from different countries share a language increases their trading by 10%.

• 20:46Speaker 08

  Sometimes it's difficult to isolate the impact of languages. But the general, so general statement is the closer the countries in linguistic sense, the larger the volume of the trade and the easier the trade between the countries.

• 21:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's say there are two nations that want to trade, or maybe even 10 nations that want to trade. And if you can pick one thing that they have most in common in order to make good trade, forget about all the other stuff. Would it be a political viewpoint that's shared, cultural or linguistic?

• 21:16Speaker 08

  I would say language if you really separate among the three. But the problem is that linguistic and cultural, they're sort of interdependent.

• 21:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  But one study in the Journal of International Economics found, quote, "At least two thirds of the influence of language comes from ease of communication alone and has nothing to do with ethnic ties or trust." Furthermore, it found the impact of linguistic factors was still strong, even after controlling for, quote, "common religion, common law, and the history of wars, as well as distance, contiguity, and two separate measures of ex-colonialism."

• 21:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's easy to see how this kind of thing might play out in practice.

• 22:00Speaker 08

  So like a couple of days ago, I attended the Economic Forum in St. Petersburg and I listened to the speech of the Indian Prime Minister. Mr. Modi spoke in Hindi. He's chosen not to speak English. So he basically relied on translation, on somebody, a single translator, who translated his speech into Russian.

• 22:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Unfortunately, it wasn't very good Russian.

• 22:25Speaker 08

  It was horrible. It was unbelievably bad translation. And I was just stunned by the fact that he continued to do it. It was obvious that there was no contact with the audience. Audience lost an interest very quickly because when you rely, give your emotions, your ideas to some translator, you don't know what will happen.

• 22:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you put a price on what gets lost in translation? That's hard to do, but it's a non-trivial amount, that's for sure.

• 22:54Speaker 08

  It was such a tremendous chance for him. You know, people were open, actually expecting this speech and saying, "India is open for business." So I talked with the Russian businessman after that, and they were sort of hesitant about all these things. If they don't speak English, why would we go there?

• 23:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the science here is not very precise.

• 23:13Speaker 08

  Then it's different, different areas. So the trade of China is now growing everywhere in spite of Chinese language being very distant from everything else. So.

• 23:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it's important to look at the particulars. In general, though?

• 23:28Speaker 08

  In general, the literature shows that linguistic diversity has a negative impact, generally speaking, on economic growth.

• 23:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So linguistic diversity has a negative impact on economic growth. There's also the roughly $40 billion a year we spend on global language services, primarily translation and interpretation, and another $50-plus billion a year spent learning other languages. There are obviously many reasons you might want to learn another language, but the primary driver seems to be economics. We looked at this in an earlier episode called, "Is Learning a Foreign Language Really Worth It?" One European study found that a second language could increase your wages between 5% and 20%, depending on which language and country. The biggest boost, perhaps not surprisingly, went to those learning English. There are still plenty of places where English won't do you much good, but at something like

• 24:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  1.5 billion speakers, it has certainly become what John McWhorter calls "a big fat language", which is even more striking when you consider that only about 400 million of them are native speakers.

• 24:36Speaker 12

  The reason why English is so popular around the world or so widely used has to do with the British Empire.

• 24:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Michael Gordon again.

• 24:44Speaker 12

  Otherwise, it's the language of a small island in the North Sea that happened to spread fairly globally, whereas Chinese is the language of a very large landmass that's contiguous.

• 24:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the rise of English isn't all tied to British colonialism.

• 24:57Speaker 12

  So the story is partially about the rise of American power and the attractiveness of American higher education, the desire of people to do postdocs in the US and to publish in US journals.

• 25:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Consider science, previously dominated in the West by Latin and in the East by Sanskrit and Classical Chinese.

• 25:15Speaker 12

  Today, there is basically one common language for communication in the elite natural sciences, like physics, biology, chemistry, geology, which is overwhelmingly English. By overwhelmingly, I mean over 95% of world publication in those sciences is in English, and there's never been anything quite like that before.

• 25:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  This requires more than just a familiarity with English.

• 25:40Speaker 12

  What we now demand of people is an extremely high level of both written and oral fluency in English. So it's very hard to get that fluency, and it imposes an educational burden on them. And you have people in Japan who spend years learning English when their counterparts in Canada are just learning more science. And so that creates a mechanism that reinforces the elite status of Anglophone institutions. There probably are people in the world who would be wonderful scientists but can't get the English and therefore can't quite participate in the international community.

• 26:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if they can't participate, what kind of science is the rest of the world missing out on? The massive leverage of English in the scientific community and in other communities is something you probably don't think about much if you are a native English speaker.

• 26:35Speaker 12

  So that native speakers of English learn English for free from their parents and the community around them. And they benefit enormously from everybody else spending years putting this language into their heads.

• 26:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  For a native speaker, that's the status quo.

• 26:50Speaker 12

  The problem with the status quo is it's not fair. The people who benefit the most from it pay the least for it.

• 26:56Speaker 09

  One of the hardest things about a big dude language like English and its influence.

• 27:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is John McWhorter.

• 27:05Speaker 09

  Is that it's easy for a generation to start to feel that that language is the real one. And so that's the way that a language can eat up another one. And next thing you know, the kids really only speak English or some kind of English. And the indigenous language is gone. That has happened, for example, to countless Native American languages. To an extent, Native American languages were beaten out of people in boarding schools. But then to another extent, where that damage wasn't done, there was often a sense that, well, English is what's spoken, and what grandma speaks is for grandma, but I'm not grandma. All it takes is one generation like that, and the language is gone.

• 27:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Linguists predict that of the roughly 7,000 languages now spoken on Earth, some 3,000 will go extinct within the next century.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  I don't want my language to go extinct.

• 28:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, how linguistic differences can lead to bloodshed.

• 28:18Speaker 08

  So many people died in the war, which in fact easily could have been avoided.

• 28:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  How language affects thinking.

• 28:25Speaker 11

  There are certainly claims about types of thinking that become very hard without language.

• 28:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And is the European Union our modern day Tower of Babel?

• 28:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think so.

• 28:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up next on Freakonomics Radio.

• 29:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've been talking about talking, how it came to be that 7-plus-billion people on Earth 1.0 speak some 7,000 different languages, and the simple fact that a great many of us can't understand the most basic thing that someone else may be saying.

• 32:01Speaker 06

  Excusez-moi, où sont les toilettes? J'aurais besoin d'un service de toilette.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Tu peux me demander? Tu peux me demander? Dans les sciences, où est-ce que tu vas? Je vais te demander une autre.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Excusez-moi, où est-ce que tu vas?

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Excusez-moi, où est-ce que tu vas?

• 32:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  You may be tempted to think, hey, wait a minute, why don't we just standardize our language? Well, that can get messy real fast.

• 32:24Speaker 08

  The bloodiest example, actually, probably over the course of this century is Sri Lanka war.

• 32:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is The Economist Shlomo Weber.

• 32:31Speaker 08

  There was a linguistic war in between two groups of people.

• 32:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  For some 2,000 years, two major ethno-linguistic groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamil, had coexisted relatively peacefully on an island in South Asia now known as Sri Lanka. Over time, it was colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch, then the British. The British gave it up in 1948, and in 1956...

• 32:57Speaker 08

  What happened is that the Sinhalese majority tried to impose Sinhala-only act, making this language of the majority the only official language of the country.

• 33:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Sinhalese-led government introduced the Sinhala-only act, which Tamil leaders called a form of apartheid. Tamil protests turned violent, and that violence begat a full-fledged civil war that would last 26 years. Tens of thousands of people died.

• 33:26Speaker 08

  Reality, of course, is that the situation already was tense, but I think the intensity of the conflict would have been much lower than without this Sinhala-only act. And the price is just staggering. There's just so many people died in the war, which in fact easily could have been avoided.

• 33:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tamil was ultimately accorded official status alongside Sinhalese. It still took a long time for things to settle down. In 2011, a reconciliation commission recommended that schoolchildren be taught in both Tamil and Sinhalese. Quote, "It is the language that unifies and binds a nation," their report read. "It is imperative that the official languages policy is implemented in an effective manner to promote understanding, diversity, and national integration."

• 34:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, does language bind us or divide us? Short answer: both.

• 34:27Speaker 11

  I will say that tribalism develops very, very quickly.

• 34:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Lara Boroditsky from UC San Diego. She has found linguistic tribalism in many precincts.

• 34:36Speaker 11

  So if you join an online community, for example, let's say there's a new TV show that comes out. Within a few weeks, there will be phrases and vocabulary items and memes that can only be understood by people who participate in that linguistic community. And very quickly, it becomes so that new people who join the community, the newbies, are at least initially excluded because they don't know how to use that set of vocabulary items correctly, and they have to spend some time learning.

• 35:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Offline communities have the same tendencies.

• 35:11Speaker 11

  They show a lot of these very common patterns of quick innovation, quick change, which you get in languages all over the world, and a desire to differentiate. People, on the one hand, want to communicate with one another, but on the other hand, they want to have a shibboleth. They want to have some way of revealing who really belongs and who doesn't belong.

• 35:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is called signaling theory.

• 35:37Speaker 08

  Well, absolutely.

• 35:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm curious to know, from your perspective as an economist, how much value people place on their language in terms of identity and not just usefulness?

• 35:50Speaker 08

  I think that religion and language, they are two most important factors in identifying people identify themselves. So, yeah, people's attachment to the language is a symbol of their identity and the desire for independence. And everywhere, in every case, the importance of the language and attachment to language and importance of education of language of your own children, this language is just very difficult to overestimate.

• 36:16Speaker 09

  Since we have 7,000 different languages, one of the reasons that you might want to preserve them is that having a separate language in the world that we know is part of being a culture. You don't absolutely need one because I don't want to say that an American Jewish person isn't really Jewish unless they speak fluent Yiddish or Hebrew, but it certainly does help. And when you don't have the languages, it's easier for the culture to disappear. So yeah, but it is partly our fondness for our acceptance of diversity, which is a major philosophical advance over the way people felt as recently as, say, 70 or 80 years ago.

• 36:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Again, the question becomes, how much linguistic diversity is the right amount? Here's one answer. Enough for anyone to feel connected to the community of their choice, but not so much as to hamper trade or start a war. It's also worth thinking about the benefits of linguistic diversity and of language generally that go beyond the utilitarian.

• 37:17Speaker 11

  There are certainly claims about types of thinking that become very hard without language or become unlikely without language.

• 37:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Boroditsky, you may recall, is a cognitive scientist.

• 37:31Speaker 11

  And I do a lot of work on language and cognition, how the languages we speak shape the way we think.

• 37:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if you take bilinguals, for instance.

• 37:40Speaker 11

  You'll see that they think differently from the monolinguals of any of their languages. And they do it even when they're not speaking the language of interest.

• 37:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  She studied this phenomenon in the lab.

• 37:52Speaker 11

  So we bring people in and we teach them new little mini languages and then we measure in non-linguistic tasks how they've changed the way that they think.

• 38:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Indonesian, for instance, doesn't include tenses like English does. So the researchers tested whether teaching Indonesian speakers some English would change how they thought about time.

• 38:11Speaker 11

  We would show people pictures of someone, for example, about to kick a ball, in the process of kicking a ball or having just kicked a ball, and then test their memory.

• 38:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  English monolinguals were better than Indonesian monolinguals at remembering information about time, that is, when the ball was kicked.

• 38:30Speaker 11

  But then when you look at bilinguals, Indonesian-English bilinguals, they start to shift. So Indonesian-English bilinguals are better than monolingual Indonesian speakers at remembering when something happened. And they also start to value that information more when deciding what's more similar.

• 38:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's some debate over the reliability and significance of this sort of lab finding.

• 38:52Speaker 11

  Take the example of color, right? So languages divide up the color spectrum differently. And you can show that people who speak a language that makes a distinction, for example, between light blue and dark blue, the way Russian does, they are faster at distinguishing shades of blue if they fall on opposite sides of the color boundary. But, you know, they're faster by a few hundred milliseconds. So for theories of perception, it's a big deal. For practical purposes, it's not a big deal.

• 39:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  And again, the so-called bilingual advantage isn't a slam dunk empirical fact. There is, however, some compelling evidence suggesting that bilingualism may delay the onset of Alzheimer's and dementia.

• 39:36Speaker 11

  Very often, people ask me because they people have heard, oh, bilinguals have increased cognitive control, or they can do a little bit better on the Wisconsin card sorting task, which is like a task of switching ability. Should I learn another language so I can get these benefits? And to me, that always sounds like, you know, should I climb Mount Everest so that I can tone my calves?

• 40:00Speaker 11

  Certainly, your calves will get more toned if you climb Mount Everest. But you also will have climbed Mount Everest, which will have tremendous other benefits and hardships along the way.

• 40:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if we can agree that linguistic diversity on Earth 1.0 has benefits and costs, the magnitude of which we could debate forever, what, if anything, would we do different on Earth 2.0? Should we even consider having one universal language? Or are we better off with our modern day Tower of Babel?

• 40:38Speaker 07

  So the curse of Babel is the existential condition in which we live every day.

• 40:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Princeton English professor Esther Shore.

• 40:46Speaker 07

  We use language to communicate, but we cannot rely on it to make ourselves understood.

• 40:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  I had some final questions for the economist Shlomo Weber about an institution he's been studying.

• 41:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is the European Union, really going back to when the EU was being put together, did that in any way parallel, do you think, the Tower of Babel?

• 41:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think so. Every country can impose, can include its official language as the official language of the Union. It's funny to say that Luxembourg, actually, which has its own language, Luxembourgish, refrained from imposing Luxembourgish as an official language of the Union. But then, what happened is when the Maltese entered the Union, which is a smaller country than Luxembourg, that in Maltese became an official language of the Union, that Luxembourg says, "Why don't we do the same thing?"

• 41:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So considering that then there are, you know, a couple dozen languages officially in the EU, what does that translate to in cost in terms of translation and time and communication?

• 41:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, I think it's a billion euros, yeah. But it's tremendous cost, not only a financial cost, but also in terms of communication and ability people to understand. On one hand, you would like to publish all the documents of the Union in all the languages that the people will understand, but then it becomes a nightmare.

• 42:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  All that translation, I'm gathering, is not done by machine learning, by robots?

• 42:20Speaker 08

  Not yet, not yet, not yet. And then, of course, you cannot find people who can speak, you know, in the same time Maltese and Estonian. So, you know, you need to have to translate it from Maltese to Estonian, and from Maltese to English, and from English to Estonian, so all of these things. Let me give another even more painful example about the patent application. So if you need a patents in different countries, you really have to do it in every country because the legislation everywhere, there is no unified legislation across the Union. So it delays so many things.

• 42:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you made the argument, along with a couple co-authors, that the best thing for the EU to do would be to settle on three core languages, English, French, and German, although you said Italian could be substituted for French.

• 43:04Speaker 08

  Could be, yeah, could be.

• 43:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  But then you thought about a little bit more. You discussed how there could be six core languages, including Spanish, Polish, and again, Italian or French. The EU obviously read this. How much did they love your idea?

• 43:18Speaker 08

  No, they didn't like it. Well, it's not that the people didn't like it. On some individual level, people agreed that it should be should be something like that. But it's so difficult to to change the policies because you really all the countries have a veto power over linguistic policy and threatened in the European constitution. So you need really to go for every country to try to to waive the veto right, which is impossible.

• 43:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you this, Shlomo. You've made it clear that you consider Brexit to be, you know, a bad move and a sad move. But on the other hand, just playing devil's advocate for a minute, the more I hear you talk about just the language issue in the EU, I can see why England would want to get the hell out. It sounds like if you can't even get to the point where you can eliminate some of a billion dollars worth of simply translation costs because of the fact that everybody's language is essentially an official language, that just sounds to me like bureaucracy to the nth degree and frustrating and really hard to get anything substantial done. Tell me why you don't feel that way.

• 44:25Speaker 08

  I mean, this, the basic thing that's, you know, the conflict between globalization and localization. And I don't think we do a very good job of doing that. So I would go with global, a global language on some higher level and but at but still keeping the local language for everybody because, you know, sensibilities of the people, you want to everybody engage. So please give the people a reason to do so.

• 44:52Speaker 09

  The truth is this. The final word today goes to John McWhorter. If language were not inherently mutable, if some language had developed probably 150,000 years ago, and it had stayed more or less the same among all the different groups of humans, except maybe some different words, then not only would a whole lot of communication problems not be there, not only could we perhaps argue that some wars would have been less likely to take place, but I can guarantee you this, nobody today Would be standing around saying, wouldn't it be nice if actually there were 7,000 different languages and people had trouble understanding each other and we had to have translators?

• 45:36Speaker 09

  And so, as much as I delight in the variety of languages that there has come to be by accident, the truth is that if we could start again, I don't think anybody would wish that the situation was the way it came out.

• 45:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  If we could start again, well, by the power vested in me as a podcast host, we can. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we pretend that all the colonial baggage and global bureaucracy on Earth 1.0 don't exist, and we try to come up with the optimal language plan for Earth 2.0.

• 46:13Speaker 09

  I would say that an ideal in the future is that everybody in the world can communicate in one language, and that then people have another language that they use with their in-group, and that we have as many of those languages as possible.

• 46:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  We throw around some nominations for a universal language.

• 46:32Speaker 07

  It's called Esperanto because that was his pseudonym, Doctoro Esperanto, which means the hopeful one.

• 46:38Speaker 09

  You would need, oddly, a language that had a lot less in it than many people would expect.

• 46:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  And we talk about using technology and biology to make language more effortless.

• 46:50Speaker 12

  That kind of leveraging the way children can soak up languages almost effortlessly would improve some aspects of the system.

• 47:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's coming up next time

• 47:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  on Freakonomics Radio.

• 47:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez. We had help this week from Sam Baer. Special thanks to our intern Kent McDonald. The music you hear throughout the episode is composed by Luis Guerra. You can and should subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher, or wherever you capture your podcasts. You should also check out our archive at Freakonomics.com, where you can stream or download every episode we've ever made. You can also read the transcripts, and you can find links to the underlying academic research.

• 47:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Wie immer. Wie immer. Und pastinya, vielen Dank fürs Zuhören. Vielen Dank fürs Zuhören.

• 48:15Speaker 13

  As we always we, angst they or fe isning le.

• 48:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 49:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 49:42Speaker 14

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• 50:12Speaker 15

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