Transcript of “Multilingual and Ambidextrous. Or Ambilingual and Multidextrous?”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Kristen. I’m calling you from central Wisconsin.
All right. Well, what’s on your mind today?
I’m kind of a curiosity about my husband’s linguistic abilities.
He speaks really five languages fluently and several others that he sort of dabbles in.
Wow.
Three of them he has no memory of learning. He learned them very young.
Warani Indian, which is a Native American language in South America where he grew up,
As well as Spanish and Portuguese. He also speaks Italian and then German and then finally English.
What prompted me to call in is he also is Jewish, but where he grew up in Paraguay, South America, being Jewish was not something that was practiced.
So he never really learned much beyond liturgical Hebrews.
When we were raising our daughter, he said, let’s have her in Jewish day school.
We were meeting with the rabbi and several other parents in preparation for that.
And he was taking notes, as we all were, as the rabbi was talking.
And the rabbi’s using English words and Hebrew words off and on.
And we’re all taking notes.
And myself and a couple other people in the room started to notice that he kept switching the pen in his hand, left, right, left, right, left, right, like, weirdly so.
And I looked down as he was doing it and realized that when a thought would come to him in Spanish or Warani, he would write it down with his left hand.
As a thought would come to him in English or he was writing down a word he wanted to know in Hebrew or something, he would write it with his right hand.
Yeah.
Afterwards, myself and a lady from across the room was like, why are you going on?
And I showed her the paper and we were both like, he said, I was not switching hands.
What are you talking about?
We’re like, no, you were.
You wrote this with your left hand, this with your right hand.
And he was not really conscious of doing it.
But it was definitely the, I don’t know what you want to call them, the hardcore language.
Warani Spanish was with his left and the English and Hebrew was with his right hand.
Let me ask you, so he’s ambidextrous?
He is ambidextrous, yes.
When he plays soccer, any sports, he’s equally left and right-handed.
When he had surgery on his shoulder, he could write just as well with his left hand.
Okay, yeah, that’s probably an important part of this.
Just to kind of zero in, I think the key thing here is that handedness, as we call it,
That ability to switch from the right to the left doesn’t really map onto switching hemispheres for
Language. So your husband’s switching based on the language is more likely due to task switching
And previous experience when he learned the languages. I think it’s really crucial here,
The point that you made that Hebrew and English are the last languages that he’s learned out of
The ones he knows best, right? Correct. And so they are done with the right hand. And so that
Seems to be a habit more than anything to do with the language control of the brain.
So for most people, language processing happens in the left hemisphere. There’s a couple key areas
There. Broca’s area, which is about speech production and grammar, and Wernicke’s area,
Which is critical for comprehension.
15% of people, it’s the other way.
It’s on the right side of the brain.
But even people who are ambidextrous tend to have this,
You know, all the language processing happens on one side of the brain.
But it doesn’t necessarily map to which hand they use,
Even if they’re ambidextrous.
So we’re talking about what really is at play here is probably muscle memory.
He wrote with his right hand when he learned those languages
And the motor control that goes with that.
And then the languages that have deeper memory traces are with the left hand.
That makes sense because I’ve always suspected that he might be naturally left-handed.
Yeah.
But he was forced to be right-handed.
That is a excellent point.
So that would have been when he was older after he learned those original languages.
Kristen, that is such a great point because so often people who are left-handed are made to feel bad about it or they feel bad on their own since most other people are right-handed.
And they do their best to work with that right hand.
Sometimes people become very good at it,
And they appear ambidextrous,
But actually they’re left-handed
With some learned skills on the right.
But the brain is complex.
There might be subconscious connections there
Where he prefers one hand over the other
Because he associates it with one language or the other,
But the brain is so complex
We can’t 100% say for sure
That there isn’t some hemispheric activation happening here,
But probably not.
Oh, interesting. Well, and I was also curious, too, about like, he was a soldier for a large part of his life and was deployed in Iraq when we were married. And when he would call when he was very tired, like out in the field, you know, not sleeping for almost a day or whatever, he would call and he would be speaking in Spanish, sometimes in Warani.
And I would tell him, I do speak Spanish, but not Guarani.
And so when he would get going to Guarani, I’d have to say,
I don’t understand you. What are you saying?
And he would say, is the signal not good?
Oh, he wouldn’t even realize which language he was speaking to you.
He had no idea he was speaking. He thought he was speaking English.
That’s kind of lovely in a way that his comfort with you is so great
That he falls back to the languages of the cradle, as they’re sometimes called.
Oh, well, I’ll have to remind him of that.
But one thing to look for as the two of you get older is he may find himself going back to those credo languages and enjoying the sound and the feel of them.
And you might find yourselves looking for, you know, entertainment books and movies and television in Paraguayan Spanish so that he can kind of relive that.
It often happens as we get older that that first language starts to reassert itself.
Well, that makes sense.
OK, that’s good to know.
Thank you.
But I want to say also, you may be the first person we’ve talked to on this show ever who knew somebody who spoke Guarani and mentioned it.
Yeah.
Really?
Well, there are not a lot of people, especially the U.S., that speak it.
There are some.
But, yeah, it’s definitely it’s a beautiful language.
Yeah.
It’s spoken in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina.
Where else?
A little bit in Bolivia, but primarily there, that’s where the Indians that are native there are from.
And interestingly, Paraguay is the only country in any of the Americas where it’s a Native American language,
Has survived so well and so strongly that it is one of the official languages of the country.
That’s really interesting. Yeah, I should check that out. That’s amazing.
Well, you have been a delight to talk to.
It has just been super interesting.
Give your husband a squeeze for us because we’re both jealous of somebody who can speak that many languages.
Yeah, we are.
Love to hear from him sometime.
Yeah, yeah.
He’s welcome to call us with interesting warreny phrases or whatever.
Oh, there are lots of them.
All right.
You take care now, right?
Very interesting language.
So, yes, thank you so much.
That actually answers that long-held wondering of mine, what is going on?
So thank you.
All right.
Be well.
Bye-bye.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
