Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I would see it as a great loss because languages contain rich ideas about the culture. When people learn languages they may actually come to think about the world differently. Languages contain all these kind of different things like the spatial reference systems that I mentioned. Different ways of partitioning up the group. People can be bilingual. You don’t have to necessarily impede communication. You can learn one language, the traditional language that you speak with people in your community, and also learn a kind of lingua franca so you can speak to the wider world. If I could just follow up on that, though. If we think the larger cultural units have more rapid cultural evolution and they carry memes better . . . and a second language is much tougher. You go to India. The percentage of people who really speak English well in India, it’s probably below 10 percent would be my sense. You say Denmark is in some ways very well interconnected with the world. There’s a real chance in workplaces Danish won’t be spoken 30 years from now, and English will be. It’s already the case. Shouldn’t you consistently at most margins favor the larger language groups? Either that or revise your views as to the greater number of pieces having more rapid cultural evolution. It could be if you have seven languages in your country, you have more poetic ideas and different frameworks. I think when people use different languages, they can think about things in different ways and it’ll highlight different features of the problem. I think it’s still valuable. I would encourage people to learn multiple languages. As long as you start young enough, we seem to be pretty good at it. It may actually have some positive cognitive effect; debate remains about that. I think we should encourage people to learn multiple languages.…

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