Magdalena Wrembel & Anna Balas presented on multilingualism, conveying that familiarity with multiple languages should be conceived as the norm in modern society rather than the exception. They substantiated this claim with neurolinguistic and geo-demographic evidence.
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Talk description:
Multilingualism is becoming the norm rather than the exception in the modern world. People who speak several foreign languages are more creative, communicative and better at solving problems. The lecture aims to disseminate research results and information on multilingualism, linguistic diversity and multilingual education in society and to build awareness in this area. Multilingualism is a dynamic process. In the past, it was believed that the mother tongue determines the learning of subsequent foreign languages, while today there is talk of mutual interactions between languages, including non-native ones. The direction of these changes can be multiple, and languages can interact with each other regardless of the order in which they were acquired. It happens that one of the non-indigenous languages becomes dominant. We observe the changes taking place within the mother tongue under the influence of the knowledge of other foreign languages, visible, for example, in the sphere of sound and grammar or the degree of activation of subsequent languages in the brain. A multilingual person is not the sum of monolingual people; this is a synergy, a dynamic that creates a completely new language quality.