‘Among the many asymmetries that worked to Britain's disadvantage in its negotiations to leave the European Union,’ Marek Kohn notes, in one of the barbed asides that punctuate this book, ‘was the twenty-seven other nations' fluent grasp of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, unmatched by any corresponding British familiarity with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Bild.’

It's a point that seems especially clear from where I sit, as an Englishman living in German-speaking Central Europe, though I suppose it only takes you so far – one is loth, after all, to understress the drastic incompetence of the British politicians involved.

For a writer from the UK to be expatiating on the joys and benefits of multilingualism now, mid-Brexit, is not a timely coincidence – Kohn was inspired to the subject directly by seeing the nasty flare-up of xenophobia that followed the 2016 referendum. Kohn, whose family are from Poland, found himself responding not with a stronger desire to ‘identify as’ British, but, on the contrary, with a stronger desire to assert his Polish heritage and to properly learn the language which until then he had spoken only poorly and infrequently.

One of the themes of this book is the ways in which language is used both to bind people together and, conversely, to establish lines of difference between one community and another. ‘Pragmatic arguments – migrants should speak English to avoid misunderstandings in the workplace, or to make friends in the playground – shade into demands of a more dogmatic cast: this is the language of the country, so if you want to live here, you had better speak it.’ The end-point of this mindset can be lethal, as easily seen all over the world – Kohn retails several examples, including from the Middle East where not long ago, for instance,

a bus was boarded by armed men, one of whom held a tomato and demanded each passenger tell him what it was: those who said it was a ‘banadura’, identifying themselves as Lebanese, were ordered off the bus; those who called it a ‘bandura’, revealing themselves to be Palestinians, remained on the bus and were slaughtered.

Similar incidents were common during the Balkans conflicts too. (This was, remember, the original function of a shibboleth: ‘Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.’)

Not all of the book, though, is on such a life-or-death level as this; a lot of it simply has to do with Kohn trying to get to grips with the latest research into bilingualism, what its beneficial effects are on the brain (if any), and how it might affect someone's view of society.

I really admired the ideas animating the book, but Kohn's layman viewpoint did occasionally give me pause. He doesn't write as a linguistic researcher, or even as an expert commentator on the field (his previous books have been on subjects as diverse as Darwinism and British drug culture); if anything, he is writing as an interested bilingual person, although given his confessedly rusty knowledge of Polish, even this is a bit of a stretch. Which makes his conclusions sometimes a little shaky.

A lot of his discussions of different languages have a decidedly neo-Whorfian tone which I think we should be cautious about; for instance, after considering languages with evidential grammar (like Turkish), he decides that ‘it is easy to infer that a population largely trusts its broadcasters if they accept that the default mode for news reports is the first-hand form’. This is quite a leap. Linguists tend to be suspicious of this kind of argument, not because it is totally without truth but rather because it so easily blends with arguments from pure stereotype (German is ordered and utilitarian, Italian baroque and expressive, etc etc).

He also sometimes displays a quasi-mystical, literalist view of languages' untranslatability, of the kind that is very rarely shared by people who actually translate professionally (or even regularly). When talking about how Spanish-speakers describe breaking a box, for example, he seems almost deliberately obtuse:

They could say ‘se me rompió’, which can only be translated nonsensically or awkwardly in English: ‘it broke to me’, ‘to me it happened that it broke’.

Huh? This example is especially weird because English actually has a very similar impersonal prepositional construction: ‘it broke on me’.

Being born in an English-speaking country used to be quite an advantage. Nowadays, it's almost a disadvantage, since everyone of basic education in the rest of the world speaks English anyway, and they speak a couple of other languages as well. And those who speak it as a second language may be getting extra benefits when it's used, since research suggests that using a non-native language helps you bypass emotional, knee-jerk reactions – something called the ‘foreign language effect’. Again, Kohn can't help seeing Brexit as a case in point:

Britain, speaking English and only English, based its decisions on emotions and found itself in disarray. The twenty-seven countries on the other side, speaking English among themselves, achieved a remarkable degree of coherence, based on a clear understanding of their collective interests.

Well, maybe. Certainly for those who do speak more than one language, or who want to speak more than one language, this book is full of fascinating anecdotes and studies to help consider what it means in a new light. And despite his flirtations with linguistic determinism, Kohn's conclusions on language are unimpeachable: ‘Its effects on thought are disputed. Its effects upon the relations between people are indisputable.’ ( )