A Proverb on the Expansive Power of Language

The number of languages you know, the number of persons you are.

Local Oral Tradition

I learned this popular proverb early on when I was studying our Central Asian language. This saying presents the fascinating idea, common in the multilingual world of the Central Asia, that there is an expansive power inherent in language learning.  According to our locals (and the neighboring people groups, who have an equivalent proverb in their languages also), there is some kind of astounding addition to your life that happens when you learn another language – an addition significant enough to grant you some kind of extra personhood.

Many years later I would find out that this proverb does not actually originate in Central Asia, but in medieval Europe. It was Charlemagne, Charles the Great, king of France and Emperor of much of western Europe who said, “To have a second language is to possess a second soul.” That’s quite the claim from Big Charlie, a king who was actually illiterate, though apparently gifted in speaking and understanding multiple languages. What was it that Charlemagne experienced that would cause him to make such an outlandish (and potentially heretical) claim? And how can you square this with the couple years of foreign language study you may have been forced to do in high school that made you feel not like you had gained an extra soul, but rather like you no longer had any soul left at all?

If you’ve never learned another language, or if your initial dabblings were as dry as saltine crackers baking on a North African sand dune, you’re going to have trust Charlemagne. You’re going to have to trust our Central Asian friends. You’re going to have to trust me. Or at least hear us out. Something expansive happens in your life, both inside you and around you, when you learn another language. And it makes all of the hard work absolutely worth it.

It’s not uncommon for polyglots, those who have learned many languages, to speak of having a different personality for each language that they speak. I only speak three languages, but I get what they are talking about. My parents are Americans, so I am a native American English speaker. But I was raised mostly in Melanesia, where I learned the Pidgin trade language as a toddler, and thus grew up bilingual. Then in college I spent a year volunteering in Central Asia, where I began to learn my third language. I would later return to the same region for seven years and eventually become an advanced speaker of that language. It’s a subtle thing, but yes, I think and I act differently depending on which language I’m operating in. I have, in some sense, gained a different side to myself, or rather found something that only that unique language and culture can draw out.

The author C.S. Lewis wrote something very similar in The Four Loves about the effect that different friends have on drawing out the unique facets of someone’s personhood, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.” I would contend that languages have a similar effect on us. No one language is large enough to “call the whole man into activity.” Learning another language is like gaining another true friend, the kind who can bring you to life in unique, funny, and fascinating ways.

Have you ever considered that there may be facets to who you are that you can only discover by learning another language? No, not a second soul – but perhaps a part of your soul you’ve yet to become acquainted with.

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