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In addition to PET and fMRI, which show which areas of the brain are activated by certain tasks, researchers also use diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which shows the neural pathways that connect different brain areas, thus providing insight into how different areas interact. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is another hemodynamic method used in language tasks.
Neurolinguists employ a variety of experimental techniques in order to use brain imaging to draw conclusions about how language is represented and processed in the brain. These techniques include the "subtraction" paradigm, "mismatch design", "violation-based" studies, various forms of "priming", and "direct stimulation" of the brain.
Many language studies, particularly in fMRI, use the subtraction paradigm, in which brain activation in a task thought to involve some aspect of language processing is compared against activation in a baseline task thought to involve similar non-linguistic processes but not to involve the linguistic process. For example, activations while participants read words may be compared to baseline activations while participants read strings of random letters (in attempt to isolate activation related to lexical processing—the processing of real words), or activations while participants read syntactically complex sentences may be compared to baseline activations while participants read simpler sentences.
In psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, "priming" refers to the phenomenon whereby a subject can recognize a word more quickly if he or she has recently been presented with a word that is similar in meaning or morphological makeup (i.e., composed of similar parts). If a subject is presented with a "prime" word such as "doctor" and then a "target" word such as "nurse", if the subject has a faster-than-usual response time to "nurse" then the experimenter may assume that word "nurse" in the brain had already been accessed when the word "doctor" was accessed. Priming is used to investigate a wide variety of questions about how words are stored and retrieved in the brain and how structurally complex sentences are processed.
In many neurolinguistics experiments, subjects do not simply sit and listen to or watch stimuli, but also are instructed to perform some sort of task in response to the stimuli. Subjects perform these tasks while recordings (electrophysiological or hemodynamic) are being taken, usually in order to ensure that they are paying attention to the stimuli. At least one study has suggested that the task the subject does has an effect on the brain responses and the results of the experiment.
The lexical decision task involves subjects seeing or hearing an isolated word and answering whether or not it is a real word. It is frequently used in priming studies, since subjects are known to make a lexical decision more quickly if a word has been primed by a related word (as in "doctor" priming "nurse").
Many studies, especially violation-based studies, have subjects make a decision about the "acceptability" (usually grammatical acceptability or semantic acceptability) of stimuli. Such a task is often used to "ensure that subjects [are] reading the sentences attentively and that they [distinguish] acceptable from unacceptable sentences in the way the [experimenter] expect[s] them to do."
Experimental evidence has shown that the instructions given to subjects in an acceptability judgment task can influence the subjects' brain responses to stimuli. One experiment showed that when subjects were instructed to judge the "acceptability" of sentences they did not show an N400 brain response (a response commonly associated with semantic processing), but that they did show that response when instructed to ignore grammatical acceptability and only judge whether or not the sentences "made sense".
Some studies use a "probe verification" task rather than an overt acceptability judgment; in this paradigm, each experimental sentence is followed by a "probe word", and subjects must answer whether or not the probe word had appeared in the sentence. This task, like the acceptability judgment task, ensures that subjects are reading or listening attentively, but may avoid some of the additional processing demands of acceptability judgments, and may be used no matter what type of violation is being presented in the study.
Subjects may be instructed not to judge whether or not the sentence is grammatically acceptable or logical, but whether the proposition expressed by the sentence is true or false. This task is commonly used in psycholinguistic studies of child language.
Another related form of experiment is the double-task experiment, in which a subject must perform an extra task (such as sequential finger-tapping or articulating nonsense syllables) while responding to linguistic stimuli; this kind of experiment has been used to investigate the use of working memory in language processing.
Some relevant journals include the "Journal of Neurolinguistics" and "Brain and Language". Both are subscription access journals, though some abstracts may be generally available.
Clinical linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in the description, analysis, and treatment of language disabilities, especially the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic theory.
The International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association is the unofficial organization of the field and was formed in 1991. The Journal of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics is the major research journal of the field and was founded by Martin J. Ball.
Practitioners of clinical linguistics typically work in Speech-Language Pathology departments or linguistics departments. They conduct research with the aims of improving the assessment, treatment, and analysis of disordered speech and language, and offering insights to formal linguistic theories. While the majority of clinical linguistics journals still focus only on English linguistics, there is an emerging movement toward comparative clinical linguistics across multiple languages.
The study of communication disorders has a history that can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Modern clinical linguistics, however, largely has its roots in the twentieth century, with the term ‘clinical linguistics’ gaining wider currency in the 1970s, with it being used as the title of a book by prominent linguist David Crystal in 1981. Widely credited as the ‘father of clinical linguistics’, Crystal's book "Clinical Linguistics" went on to become one of the most influential books of the field, as this new discipline was mapped out in great detail.
These are the main disciplines of clinical linguistics:
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies the sounds of human speech. Clinical phonetics involve applications of phonetics to describe speech differences and disorders, including information about speech sounds and the perceptual skills used in clinical settings.
Phonology is one of the branches of linguistics that is concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in spoken languages and signs in sign languages. Unlike clinical phonetics, clinical phonology focuses on the application of phonology on interpretations of speech sounds in a particular language and how it deals with phoneme.
In linguistics, prosody is concerned with elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but are properties of syllables and larger units of speech. Prosody is essential in communicative functions such as expressing emotions or affective states.
Morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyses the structure of words and part of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes.
Syntax is the set of rules, principles and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, usually including word order. Every language has a different set of syntactic rules, but all languages have some form of syntax.
Semantics is the study of the interpretation of signs or symbols used in agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts .
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. It refers to the description and classification of pragmatic impairments, their elucidation in terms of various pragmatic, linguistics, cognitive and neurological theories, and their assessment and treatment.
In corpus linguistics, discourse refers to the study of language expressed in corpora (samples) of “real world” text, the codified language of a field of enquiry, or a statement that determines the connections among language and structure and agency.
Linguistic concepts and theories are applied to assess, diagnose and administer language disorders. These theories and concepts commonly involve psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Clinical linguists adopt the understanding of language and the linguistic disciplines, as mentioned above, to explain language disorders and find approaches to treat them. Crystal pointed out that applications of linguistics to clinical ends are highly relational. In his book ‘Clinical Linguistics’, Crystal references many commonly known disorders with linguistic knowledge. Some examples from his book are as follows:
Some broad linguistics methods that are commonly used in the treatment of patients mentioned by Cummings (2017) include:
The past works of linguists such as Crystal were applicable to a wide range of communication disorders at every linguistic level. However, with the influx of new insights from disciplines such as genetics, cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology (among others), it is no longer sufficient to just focus on the linguistic characteristics of a particular speech impairment.
In today's context, one of the challenges in clinical linguistics includes identifying methods to bridge the knowledge of different fields to build a more holistic understanding. The translation of general research that has been done into effective tools for clinical practice is another aspect that requires future work.
The N400 is a component of time-locked EEG signals known as event-related potentials (ERP). It is a negative-going deflection that peaks around 400 milliseconds post-stimulus onset, although it can extend from 250-500 ms, and is typically maximal over centro-parietal electrode sites. The N400 is part of the normal brain response to words and other meaningful (or potentially meaningful) stimuli, including visual and auditory words, sign language signs, pictures, faces, environmental sounds, and smells.
An example of an experimental task used to study the N400 is a priming paradigm. Subjects are shown a list of words in which a prime word is either associatively related to a target word (e.g. bee and honey), semantically related (e.g. sugar and honey) or a direct repetition (e.g. honey and honey). The N400 amplitude seen to the target word (honey) will be reduced upon repetition due to semantic priming. The amount of reduction in amplitude can be used to measure the degree of relatedness between the words.
Another widely used experimental task used to study the N400 is sentence reading. In this kind of study, sentences are presented to subjects centrally, one word at a time, until the sentence is completed. Alternatively, subjects could listen to a sentence as natural auditory speech. Again, subjects may be asked to respond to comprehension questions periodically throughout the experiment, although this is not necessary. Experimenters can choose to manipulate various linguistic characteristics of the sentences, including contextual constraint or the cloze probability of the sentence-final word (see below for a definition of cloze probability) to observe how these changes affect the waveform's amplitude.
As previously mentioned, the N400 response is seen to all meaningful, or potentially meaningful, stimuli. As such, a wide range of paradigms can be used to study it. Experiments involving the presentation of spoken words, acronyms, pictures embedded at the end of sentences, music, words related to current context or orientation and videos of real-word events, have all been used to study the N400, just to name a few.
Extensive research has been carried out to better understand what kinds of experimental manipulations do and do not affect the N400. General findings are discussed below.
The frequency of a word's usage is known to affect the amplitude of the N400. With all else being constant, highly frequent words elicit reduced N400s relative to infrequent words. As previously mentioned, N400 amplitude is also reduced by repetition, such that a word's second presentation exhibits a more positive response when repeated in context. These findings suggest that when a word is highly frequent or has recently appeared in context, it eases the semantic processing thought to be indexed by the N400, reducing its amplitude.
N400 amplitude is also sensitive to a word's orthographic neighborhood size, or how many other words differ from it by only one letter (e.g. "boot" and "boat"). Words with large neighborhoods (that have many other physically similar items) elicit larger N400 amplitudes than do words with small neighborhoods. This finding also holds true for pseudowords, or pronounceable letter strings that are not real words (e.g. flom), which are not themselves meaningful but look like words. This has been taken as evidence that the N400 reflects general activation in the comprehension network, such that items that look like many words (regardless of whether it itself is a word) partially activate the representations of similar-looking words, producing a more negative N400.
The N400 is sensitive to priming: in other words, its amplitude is reduced when a target word is preceded by a word that is semantically, morphologically, or orthographically related to it.
Factors that do not affect N400 amplitude.
Additionally, grammatical violations do not elicit a large N400 response. Rather, these types of violations show a large positivity from about 500-1000 ms after stimulus onset, known as the P600.
A striking feature of the N400 is the general invariance of its peak latency. Although many different experimental manipulations affect the amplitude of the N400, few factors (aging and disease states and language proficiency being rare examples) alter the time it takes for the N400 component to reach a peak amplitude.
Although localization of the neural generators of an ERP signal is difficult due to the spreading of current from the source to the sensors, multiple techniques can be used to provide converging evidence about possible neural sources. Using methods such as recordings directly off the surface of the brain or from electrodes implanted in the brain, evidence from brain damaged patients, and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings (which measure magnetic activity at the scalp associated with the electrical signal measured by ERPs), the left temporal lobe has been highlighted as an important source for the N400, with additional contributions from the right temporal lobe. More generally, however, activity in a wide network of brain areas is elicited in the N400 time window, suggesting a highly distributed neural source.
There is still much debate as to exactly what kind of neural and comprehension processes the N400 indexes. Some researchers believe that the underlying processes reflected in the N400 occur after a stimulus has been recognized. For example, Brown and Hagoort (1993) believe that the N400 occurs late in the processing stream, and reflects the integration of a word's meaning into the preceding context (see Kutas & Federmeier, in press, for a discussion). However, this account has not explained why items that themselves have no meaning (e.g. pseudowords without defined associations) also elicit the N400. Other researchers believe that the N400 occurs much earlier, before words are recognized, and represents orthographic or phonological analysis.
More recent accounts posit that the N400 represents a broader range of processes indexing access to semantic memory. According to this account, it represents the binding of information obtained from stimulus input with representations from short- and long-term memory (such as recent context, and accessing a word's meaning in long term memory) that work together to create meaning from the information available in the current context (Federmeier & Laszlo, 2009; see Kutas & Federmeier, in press).
Another account is that the N400 reflects prediction error or surprisal. Word-based surprisal was a strong predictor of N400 amplitude in an ERP corpus. In addition, connectionist models make use of prediction error for learning and linguistic adaptation, and these models can explain several N400/P600 results in terms of prediction error propagation for learning.
As research in the field of electrophysiology continues to progress, these theories will likely be refined to include a complete account of just what the N400 represents.
The notion of a dedicated language module in the human brain originated with Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (UG). The debate on the issue of modularity in language is underpinned, in part, by different understandings of this concept. There is, however, some consensus in the literature that a module is considered committed to processing specialized representations (domain-specificity) (Bryson and Stein, 2001) in an informationally encapsulated way. A distinction should be drawn between anatomical modularity, which proposes there is one 'area' in the brain that deals with this processing, and functional modularity that obviates anatomical modularity whilst maintaining information encapsulation in distributed parts of the brain.
The available evidence points towards no one anatomical area solely devoted to processing language. The Wada test, where sodium amobarbital is used to anaesthetise one hemisphere, shows that the left-hemisphere appears to be crucial in language processing. Yet, neuroimaging does not implicate any single area but rather identifies many different areas as being involved in different aspects of language processing. and not just in the left hemisphere. Further, individual areas appear to subserve a number of different functions. Thus, the extent to which language processing occurs within an anatomical module is considered to be minimal. Nevertheless, as many have suggested, modular processing can still exist even when implemented across the brain; that is, language processing could occur within a functional module.
No double dissociation – acquired or developmental.
A common way to demonstrate modularity is to find a double dissociation. That is two groups: First, people for whom language is severely damaged and yet have normal cognitive abilities and, second, persons for whom normal cognitive abilities are grossly impaired and yet language remains intact. Whilst extensive lesions in the left hemisphere perisylvian area can render persons unable to produce or perceive language (global aphasia), there is no known acquired case where language is completely intact in the face of severe non-linguistic deterioration. Thus, functional module status cannot be granted to language processing based on this evidence.
Thus, the evidence from double dissociations does not support modularity, although lack of dissociation is not evidence against a module; this inference cannot be logically made.
Indeed, if language were a module it would be informationally encapsulated. Yet, there is evidence to suggest that this is not the case. For instance, in the McGurk effect, watching lips say one phoneme whilst another is played creates the percept of a blended phoneme. Further, Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard and Sedivy (1995) demonstrated visual information mediating syntactic processing. In addition, the putative language module should process only that information relevant to language (i.e., be domain-specific). Yet evidence suggests that areas purported to subserve language also mediate motor control and non-linguistic sound comprehension. Although it is possible that separate processes could be occurring but below the resolution of current imaging techniques, when all this evidence is taken together the case for information encapsulation is weakened.
The alternative, as it is framed, is that language occurs within a more general cognitive system. The counterargument is that there appears to be something ‘special’ about human language. This is usually supported by evidence such as all attempts to teach animals human languages to any great success have failed (Hauser et al. 2003) and that language can be selectively damaged (a single dissociation) suggesting proprietary computation may be required. Instead of postulating 'pure' modularity, theorists have opted for a weaker version, domain-specificity implemented in functionally specialised neural circuits and computation (e.g. Jackendoff and Pinker’s words, we must investigate language “not as a monolith but as a combination of components, some special to language, others rooted in more general capacities”).
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue; but many read and write in one language. Always useful to traders, multilingualism is advantageous for people wanting to participate in globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is becoming increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called polyglots.
Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is usually acquired without formal education, by mechanisms about which scholars disagree. Children acquiring two languages natively from these early years are called simultaneous bilinguals. It is common for young simultaneous bilinguals to be more proficient in one language than the other.
People who speak more than one language have been reported to be more adept at language learning compared to monolinguals.
Multilingualism in computing can be considered part of a continuum between internationalization and localization. Due to the status of English in computing, software development nearly always uses it (but not in the case of non-English-based programming languages). Some commercial software is initially available in an English version, and multilingual versions, if any, may be produced as alternative options based on the English original.
The definition of multilingualism is a subject of debate in the same way as that of language fluency. At one end of a sort of linguistic continuum, one may define multilingualism as complete competence in and mastery of more than one language. The speaker would presumably have complete knowledge and control over the languages and thus sound like a native speaker. At the opposite end of the spectrum would be people who know enough phrases to get around as a tourist using the alternate language. Since 1992, Vivian Cook has argued that most multilingual speakers fall somewhere between minimal and maximal definitions. Cook calls these people "multi-competent".
In addition, there is no consistent definition of what constitutes a distinct language. For instance, scholars often disagree whether Scots is a language in its own right or merely a dialect of English. Furthermore, what is considered a language can change, often for purely political reasons. One example is the creation of Serbo-Croatian as a standard language on the basis of the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect to function as umbrella for numerous South Slavic dialects; after the breakup of Yugoslavia it was split into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Another example is that Ukrainian was dismissed as a Russian dialect by the Russian tsars to discourage national feelings.
Many small independent nations' schoolchildren are today compelled to learn multiple languages because of international interactions. For example, in Finland, all children are required to learn at least three languages: the two national languages (Finnish and Swedish) and one foreign language (usually English). Many Finnish schoolchildren also study further languages, such as German or Russian.
In some large nations with multiple languages, such as India, schoolchildren may routinely learn multiple languages based on where they reside in the country.
In many countries, bilingualism occurs through international relations, which, with English being the global lingua franca, sometimes results in majority bilingualism even when the countries have just one domestic official language. This is occurring especially in Germanic regions such as Scandinavia, the Benelux and among Germanophones, but it is also expanding into some non-Germanic countries.
Many myths and much prejudice have grown around the notions of bi- and multilingualism in some Western countries where monolingualism is the norm. Researchers from the UK and Poland have listed the most common misconceptions:
These are all harmful convictions that have long been debunked, yet persist among many parents. In reality, bilingual children have lower scores than their monolingual peers when they are assessed in only one of the languages they are acquiring, but have substantially greater total lingual resources.
One view is that of the linguist Noam Chomsky in what he calls the human language acquisition device—a mechanism which enables a learner to recreate correctly the rules and certain other characteristics of language used by surrounding speakers. This device, according to Chomsky, wears out over time, and is not normally available by puberty, which he uses to explain the poor results some adolescents and adults have when learning aspects of a second language (L2).
If language learning is a cognitive process, rather than a language acquisition device, as the school led by Stephen Krashen suggests, there would only be relative, not categorical, differences between the two types of language learning.
Rod Ellis quotes research finding that the earlier children learn a second language, the better off they are, in terms of pronunciation. European schools generally offer secondary language classes for their students early on, due to the interconnectedness with neighbor countries with different languages. Most European students now study at least two foreign languages, a process strongly encouraged by the European Union.
Based on the research in Ann Fathman's "The Relationship between age and second language productive ability," there is a difference in the rate of learning of English morphology, syntax and phonology based upon differences in age, but that the order of acquisition in second language learning does not change with age.
People who learn multiple languages may also experience positive transfer – the process by which it becomes easier to learn additional languages if the grammar or vocabulary of the new language is similar to those of languages already spoken. On the other hand, students may also experience negative transfer – interference from languages learned at an earlier stage of development while learning a new language later in life.
In sequential bilingualism, learners receive literacy instruction in their native language until they acquire a "threshold" literacy proficiency. Some researchers use age 3 as the age when a child has basic communicative competence in their first language (Kessler, 1984). Children may go through a process of sequential acquisition if they migrate at a young age to a country where a different language is spoken, or if the child exclusively speaks his or her heritage language at home until he/she is immersed in a school setting where instruction is offered in a different language.
In simultaneous bilingualism, the native language and the community language are simultaneously taught. The advantage is literacy in two languages as the outcome. However, the teacher must be well-versed in both languages and also in techniques for teaching a second language.
The phases children go through during sequential acquisition are less linear than for simultaneous acquisition and can vary greatly among children. Sequential acquisition is a more complex and lengthier process, although there is no indication that non-language-delayed children end up less proficient than simultaneous bilinguals, so long as they receive adequate input in both languages.
A coordinate model posits that equal time should be spent in separate instruction of the native language and the community language. The native language class, however, focuses on basic literacy while the community language class focuses on listening and speaking skills. Being bilingual does not necessarily mean that one can speak, for example, English and French.
Research has found that the development of competence in the native language serves as a foundation of proficiency that can be transposed to the second language — the common underlying proficiency hypothesis. Cummins' work sought to overcome the perception propagated in the 1960s that learning two languages made for two competing aims. The belief was that the two languages were mutually exclusive and that learning a second required unlearning elements and dynamics of the first to accommodate the second. The evidence for this perspective relied on the fact that some errors in acquiring the second language were related to the rules of the first language. How this hypothesis holds under different types of languages such as Romance versus non-Western languages has yet to undergo research.
Another new development that has influenced the linguistic argument for bilingual literacy is the length of time necessary to acquire the second language. While previously children were believed to have the ability to learn a language within a year, today researchers believe that within and across academic settings, the period is nearer to five years.
An interesting outcome of studies during the early 1990s, however, confirmed that students who do complete bilingual instruction perform better academically. These students exhibit more cognitive elasticity including a better ability to analyze abstract visual patterns. Students who receive bidirectional bilingual instruction where equal proficiency in both languages is required perform at an even higher level. Examples of such programs include international and multi-national education schools.
A multilingual person is someone who can communicate in more than one language actively (through speaking, writing, or signing). Multilingual people can speak any language they write in, but cannot necessarily write in any language they speak. More specifically, bilingual and trilingual people are those in comparable situations involving two or three languages, respectively. A multilingual person is generally referred to as a polyglot, a term that may also refer to people who learn multiple languages as a hobby.
Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is acquired without formal education, by mechanisms heavily disputed. Children acquiring two languages in this way are called simultaneous bilinguals. Even in the case of simultaneous bilinguals, one language usually dominates over the other.
The reverse phenomenon, where people who know more than one language end up losing command of some or all of their additional languages, is called language attrition. It has been documented that, under certain conditions, individuals may lose their L1 language proficiency completely, after switching to the exclusive use of another language, and effectively "become native" in a language that was once secondary after the L1 undergoes total attrition.
This is most commonly seen among immigrant communities and has been the subject of substantial academic study. The most important factor in spontaneous, total L1 loss appears to be age; in the absence of neurological dysfunction or injury, only young children typically are at risk of forgetting their native language and switching to a new one. Once they pass an age that seems to correlate closely with the critical period, around the age of 12, total loss of a native language is not typical, although it is still possible for speakers to experience diminished expressive capacity if the language is never practiced.
There are differences between those who learn a language in a class environment and those who learn through total immersion, usually living in a country where the target language is widely spoken. Without the possibility to actively translate in a classroom setting, due to a lack of first language communication opportunity, the comparison between languages is reduced. In an immersive environment, the new language is almost independently learned, like the mother tongue for a child, with a direct concept-to-language translation that can become more natural than word structures learned as a subject. Added to this, the uninterrupted, immediate and exclusive practice of the new language reinforces and deepens the attained knowledge.
Bilinguals might have important labor market advantages over monolingual individuals as bilingual people can carry out duties that monolinguals cannot, such as interacting with customers who only speak a minority language. A study in Switzerland has found that multilingualism is positively correlated with an individual's salary, the productivity of firms, and the gross domestic production (GDP); the authors state that Switzerland's GDP is augmented by 10% by multilingualism. A study in the United States by Agirdag found that bilingualism has substantial economic benefits as bilingual persons were found to have around $3,000 per year more salary than monolinguals.
While many polyglots know up to six languages, the number drops off sharply past this point. People who speak many more than this—Michael Erard suggests eleven or more—are sometimes classed as "hyperpolyglots". Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, for example, was an Italian priest reputed to have spoken anywhere from 30 to 72 languages. The causes of advanced language aptitude are still under research; one theory suggests that a spike in a baby's testosterone levels while in the uterus can increase brain asymmetry, which may relate to music and language ability, among other effects.
It is important to note that terms past trilingual are rarely used. People who speak four or more languages are generally just referred to as multilingual.
Widespread multilingualism is one form of language contact. Multilingualism was common in the past: in early times, when most people were members of small language communities, it was necessary to know two or more languages for trade or any other dealings outside one's town or village, and this holds good today in places of high linguistic diversity such as Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Linguist Ekkehard Wolff estimates that 50% of the population of Africa is multilingual.
In multilingual societies, not all speakers need to be multilingual. Some states can have multilingual policies and recognize several official languages, such as Canada (English and French). In some states, particular languages may be associated with particular regions in the state (e.g., Canada) or with particular ethnicities (e.g., Malaysia and Singapore). When all speakers are multilingual, linguists classify the community according to the functional distribution of the languages involved:
N.B. the terms given above all refer to situations describing only two languages. In cases of an unspecified number of languages, the terms polyglossia, omnilingualism, and multipart-lingualism are more appropriate.
Whenever two people meet, negotiations take place. If they want to express solidarity and sympathy, they tend to seek common features in their behavior. If speakers wish to express distance towards or even dislike of the person they are speaking to, the reverse is true, and differences are sought. This mechanism also extends to language, as described in the Communication Accommodation Theory.
Some multilinguals use code-switching, which involves swapping between languages. In many cases, code-switching is motivated by the wish to express loyalty to more than one cultural group, as holds for many immigrant communities in the New World. Code-switching may also function as a strategy where proficiency is lacking. Such strategies are common if the vocabulary of one of the languages is not very elaborated for certain fields, or if the speakers have not developed proficiency in certain lexical domains, as in the case of immigrant languages.
This code-switching appears in many forms. If a speaker has a positive attitude towards both languages and towards code-switching, many switches can be found, even within the same sentence. If however, the speaker is reluctant to use code-switching, as in the case of a lack of proficiency, he might knowingly or unknowingly try to camouflage his attempt by converting elements of one language into elements of the other language through calquing. This results in speakers using words like "courrier noir" (literally mail that is black) in French, instead of the proper word for blackmail, "chantage".
With emerging markets and expanding international cooperation, business users expect to be able to use software and applications in their own language. Multilingualisation (or "m17n", where "17" stands for 17 omitted letters) of computer systems can be considered part of a continuum between internationalization and localization:
Translating the user interface is usually part of the software localization process, which also includes adaptations such as units and date conversion. Many software applications are available in several languages, ranging from a handful (the most spoken languages) to dozens for the most popular applications (such as office suites, web browsers, etc.). Due to the status of English in computing, software development nearly always uses it (but see also Non-English-based programming languages), so almost all commercial software is initially available in an English version, and multilingual versions, if any, may be produced as alternative options based on the English original.
According to Hewitt (2008) entrepreneurs in London from Poland, China or Turkey use English mainly for communication with customers, suppliers, and banks, but their native languages for work tasks and social purposes.
Even in English-speaking countries immigrants are still able to use their mother tongue in the workplace thanks to other immigrants from the same place. Kovacs (2004) describes this phenomenon in Australia with Finnish immigrants in the construction industry who spoke Finnish during working hours.
But even though foreign languages may be used in the workplace, English is still a must-know working skill. Mainstream society justifies the divided job market, arguing that getting a low-paying job is the best newcomers can achieve considering their limited language skills.
With companies going international they are now focusing more and more on the English level of their employees. Especially in South Korea since the 1990s, companies are using different English language testing to evaluate job applicants, and the criteria in those tests are constantly upgrading the level for good English. In India, it is even possible to receive training to acquire an English accent, as the number of outsourced call centers in India has soared in the past decades.
Meanwhile, Japan ranks 53rd out of 100 countries in 2019 EF English Proficiency Index, amid calls for this to improve in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Within multiracial countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, it is not unusual for one to speak two or more languages, albeit with varying degrees of fluency. Some are proficient in several Chinese dialects, given the linguistic diversity of the ethnic Chinese community in both countries.
Not only in multinational companies is English an important skill, but also in the engineering industry, in the chemical, electrical and aeronautical fields. A study directed by Hill and van Zyl (2002) shows that in South Africa young black engineers used English most often for communication and documentation. However, Afrikaans and other local languages were also used to explain particular concepts to workers in order to ensure understanding and cooperation.
In Europe, as the domestic market is generally quite restricted, international trade is a norm. Languages, that are used in multiple countries, include:
English is a commonly taught second language at schools, so it is also the most common choice for two speakers, whose native languages are different. However, some languages are so close to each other that it is generally more common when meeting to use their mother tongue rather than English. These language groups include:

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