The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa

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In “old-school linguistics”, speaking more than one language was viewed as an “aberration” that “inhibited mental development”, said Tanjil Rashid in the FT. Today, middle-class parents eagerly sign their offspring up for Mandarin lessons, believing that it will give them a cognitive edge. In his illuminating book, The Bilingual Brain, the Spanish neuropsychologist Albert Costa sifts the evidence for how bilingualism affects the brain. On the question of whether it makes you smarter, Costa’s answer is a qualified “sort of”, said Alex Massie in The Times. There is some evidence that bilingual people are better at multitasking, and studies have shown that they are slower to develop dementia. On the other hand, there may be disadvantages: bilingual children take fractionally longer to name objects as they appear on a computer screen, and they also tend to have smaller vocabularies in their two languages than their monolingual peers have in their one.

Just over half the world’s population are estimated to be “bilingual, or more than bilingual”, said Philip Hensher in The Spectator. And that proportion may increase further as transport links improve and increasing numbers are exposed to others unlike them. “English speakers are shielded from this truth because, uniquely, our need to acquire foreign languages is decreasing. Forty years ago, one had to learn a few words of Portuguese to travel round Portugal or Brazil, but nowadays their inhabitants are much less likely to be monoglot.” The Bilingual Brain is written in the “buttonholing” style with which popular science authors typically “jolly up” difficult subjects – one that, personally, I find “a bit painful”. Yet Costa’s impressive knowledge and considerable curiosity mean that this is, overall, an “engaging” and informative read.