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Polyglottic Pet Peeves
I Don’t Care How Many Languages You Speak
Stop shoving your number in my face
As a society, we’ve come to equate linguistic ability with intelligence. We hear it all the time, from documentaries about famous historical figures to your friend describing their smartest acquaintance.
A genius who speaks 7 languages!
Few other skills solicit the same degree of reverence. IQ is notoriously unreliable. Academic performance only measures your ability to study for tests. Even professional accomplishments in complex fields like brain surgery don’t guarantee you’ll be recognized as smart.
But languages are somehow different.
Our societal admiration for polyglots strikes me as overblown for multiple reasons. The first has to do with how we measure linguistic ability in the first place.
Don’t judge a cook by the length of their menu
All this praise for language skills is the result of a logical fallacy: languages are hard, ergo speaking many languages denotes intelligence.
Mastering a language is undeniably hard. But is it really mastery that we’re talking about?
