Are you a Duolingo dabbler, bilingual from birth, or a perfect polyglot? This new “multilingual calculator” can help you find out. In a new study, two researchers at New York University (both, unsurprisingly, multilingual) have developed an interactive tool that allows people to assess just how multilingual they truly are.
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The multilingual calculator, which can be accessed here, accounts for nearly 50 languages, including American Sign Language, and also allows users to add unlisted languages.
Many people are surprised to see that they are more multilingual than they thought.
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
All you have to do is answer a few easy questions about when you began learning each language and how proficient you feel in it. Based on the responses, the tool generates a profile showing which language is most dominant for the user. It also provides an overall multilingualism score, placing individuals on a spectrum from monolingual to “perfect polyglot.”
The researchers have already begun toying around with their tool, and say it has produced some surprising results.
“Many people are surprised to see that they are more multilingual than they thought, even if they don’t feel ‘fully fluent’ in all their languages. That reflects a common misconception that multilingualism only counts if all languages are equally strong or native-like. In reality, multilingualism is graded, and partial knowledge still meaningfully shapes experience,” Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, the paper’s senior author and an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, told IFLScience.
“Others are surprised by which language comes out as dominant. People often equate dominance with identity, emotional attachment, or the language they ‘feel’ is theirs. But dominance is also shaped by age of acquisition and long-term patterns of use, which can quietly shift over time. The calculator makes those factors visible,” Blanco-Elorrieta added.
The input data is wholly self-reported, although the researchers explain that multiple studies have shown this is a surprisingly accurate way to get insights into people’s language abilities.
“Skepticism is understandable, but empirically, self-rated language proficiency turns out to be remarkably reliable,” explained Blanco-Elorrieta.
“Language is something people use constantly in real life, across many contexts, so they have rich, long-term evidence about what they can and cannot do,” the researcher noted.
While the calculator is publicly available for anyone to use with a few clicks, the researchers hope their online machine could be used in academic research, education, and speech therapy. More broadly, they aim to encourage a more nuanced understanding of how people juggle multiple languages.
“It provides a way to move beyond labeling people as ‘monolingual’ or ‘bilingual’ and instead treat language experience as a measurable spectrum,” Blanco-Elorrieta concluded.
The study is published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Source Link: How Multilingual Are You? This New Language Calculator Lets You Find Out In A Minute
