Bilingual Banter

The height of summer makes my brain slow down on the one hand but meander at speed down bizarre avenues on the other. I am an enormous fan of bilingualism and even more so multilingualism. Having just returned back from a week in North Wales I am reminded of the magic of the strength of relatively rare languages. I mean no disrespect to Welsh but with less than a million speakers I do consider it to be something of a rarity, even though according to UNESCO it is the only Celtic language which is not at risk. However, thinking about it if you speak a rare language in this day and age then you are definitely going to be at least bilingual, unless of course you choose to live on a rock as a hermit.

What I observed was the amazing speed of the brain, not only did I witness the sound of words which seemed to go on ad infinitum with an extremely rhythmic lilt but to then hear English words thrown into the mix and the lightening speed with which the speaker could then just automatically switch to English without drawing breath. This leads me to numerous questions, for instance, does Welsh require better breath control than other languages? Is a Welsh sentence delivered quicker than its counterpart in English? What is the syllable per second rate for Welsh? Listening to several people it did seem that their Welsh utterances were seriously flying as opposed to when they slowed down to deliver information and explanations to me, the scared looking Englishwoman. Did they slow down for me perhaps or do they always just take a breather in their other language? Prosodically speaking it was not only speed that they managed to manipulate from one language to the other but also tone, pitch and volume.

Obviously, the people in question were using both of their languages on a daily, hourly and even more frequent basis. Similarly, most people that I met due to tourism were what I would call, young. What will happen when or if they start to use one language less than the other. Does the bilingual brain really need the training which seems apparent when you are learning a foreign language? Another thing that interests me is the effect of age on the ability to cognitively function with two or more languages. I would like to think that bilingualism keeps the brain in better shape but I am not convinced that there is fact to prove this. All I can say is that Welsh seems like a challenge worth keeping.