Disclosure: this reviewer is pi-lingual, a word coined by Douglas Hofstadter to describe people who speak three languages and can also have a cringingly inept conversation with a taxi driver in a couple more. Any book like this one, which purports to prove scientifically that polyglots are superior, has my vote. All the more since no great diligence was required of me to achieve this, aside from tagging along with my parents and a couple of patient English girlfriends met at an impressionable age. I therefore picked up this account of the virtues of multilingualism in smug mode, channelling my son who, at age 7, was fond of starting conversations with strangers with “I speak three languages, how many do you speak?”, which unsurprisingly won him few friends.
I was not prepared for the number of scientific reasons this (overlong) book provides for additional smugness and fewer friends. Viorica Marian, who was born in Moldova, speaking Russian and Romanian, immigrated to the US and is now a professor at Northwestern University, has clearly made a living out of making monolingual colleagues – which in her neck of the woods must be a majority – feel inadequate. The first half of The Power of Language is a relentless, and eloquently written, studies-have-shown gallop through her work and that of her peers. All of which supposedly demonstrates, ad nauseam, that polyglots are measurably better than monoglots at almost everything: smarter, more inventive, more adaptable.
