Last October, I attended the Polyglot Conference 2018 in beautiful Ljubljana, Slovenia. The conference is an annual event where people from around the world who love learning language get together for a weekend. There are talks by all different kinds of people about learning languages, teaching languages, linguistics, and cultural topics related to language. Above all, it’s a great place to meet people who share a passion for language. (And no, you don’t have to know a lot of languages to get in – you just have to want to!)
I had a blast and learned a lot. Here are some of the highlights for me:
Speaking is not the only way to practice a language
A popular idea in the language learning community (most prominently represented by Benny Lewis) is that you should speak, speak early, and speak a lot. It makes a sort of intuitive sense and plays into a motivational narrative – just get out there and do it! But as an introverted language learner, this never rang true to me. I like to learn languages alone, and I don’t mind that I don’t always get a lot of opportunities to speak all of them. But even if I’m not chatting people up in Swedish all the time, it would still be nice to know that I can.
So it was good to see a couple of presentations about practicing active language skills without having to go out and meet speakers. Gareth Popkins spoke about methods for solo speaking practice. For example, one technique is called faithful retelling. You read or listen to a short text, take notes, and then, using only your notes, try to retell it as accurately as you can. Another one is paraphrasing: you take each sentence and rewrite it using as many different words as you can. Another talk by Lindsay Williams was about the “forgotten skill” of writing. She reminded us that writing in a new language is something you can do all the time to practice, and all you need is yourself and a pen and paper!
Studying languages systematically
Another trend in the talks on language learning was the idea of studying systematically: rather than studying whatever strikes your fancy, it can be helpful to set goals and routines. These can take different forms. You might set goals to study a certain amount of time per week, or “check in” with a certain language each day, or to assign different languages or study techniques to each day, week, or month.
Olly Richards spoke about his self-imposed challenge to learn Italian by huge amounts of passive exposure in a short time. Judith Meyer spoke about designing a language course, a Teach Yourself book for Esperanto. And Lýdia Machová talked about her experiences coaching language learners and how she helped them by making sure they each had a system tailored to their own needs. As for me, I’ve decided to try focusing on a different language each month.
The strength of a language is in how it’s used for expression, not how many speakers it has
How do you know if a language is thriving? You could rank them by the number of native speakers – in that case, Mandarin Chinese is number one. Or maybe the number of total speakers? Then English comes out on top, which makes sense. But this is clearly missing something. What if a language is spoken by a small community of people, but they all use it for everything and it shows no signs of dying out? That is clearly better than a language spoken by a larger group, but whose speakers are abandoning it in favor of another dominant language, or are embarrassed to speak it in public.
Several talks at the conference focused on the status of efforts to preserve minority languages. Samanta Baranja spoke – in Slovene – about the Roma community in Slovenia and especially efforts to include them in mainstream education while accommodating, and not marginalizing, the Roma language(s). Claudia Ferigo spoke about the Friulian language of northeastern Italy (not a dialect of Italian!) as well as the Suns Europe festival of minority-language arts. Anoushka Dufeil talked about marginalization from another perspective: women and the struggle to come up with ways of using the French language in a gender-equal way (The Académie française seems to get in the way a lot). Finally, Alex Rawlings exhorted us polyglots, as a community, to use languages to bring down the world’s Grenzen (borders or limits). He told the story of how speaking Greek made his experience as a boy spending a summer Greece incomparably more meaningful than it could ever have been in English. He pointed out that, despite the rise of global English as a means of communication, people still live their fullest lives in a diversity of languages. He spoke out against the increasing trend for people to express themselves publicly and professionally only in English, even losing the ability to use their native language to its fullest extent.
Now, with global audiences available on the Internet, smaller languages increasingly risk being relegated to domestic, social, and traditional uses, but are left out of things like pop music, movies, science, and blog posts. Many universities in Europe offer degrees taught in English that are not available in the local language, and many writers have never published in their native tongue. As a small gesture to counteract this trend, I decided to make this blog fully multilingual: all the content is available in English and Portuguese in my own words (not a translation), and I might add more languages later.
Everyone is hanging out without me on social media and I had no idea
I mean, I knew there was a Facebook group. But apparently everyone was on a Telegram channel and meeting up? I didn’t even have a working phone in Slovenia. But luckily Ljubljana is small enough that I kept running into other people from the conference anyway, and made some good friends.
Next year’s conference will be in Fukuoka, Japan. I really hope I can go but I might be too busy as I’m juggling work and grad school right now.