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The polyglots
Meet the people who speak many languages. How do they do it, and why?
Simon Calder meets people who keep learning new languages not because they have to, but because they want to. What motivates them? Situations like this - an immigrant hotel cleaner who is moved to tears because you speak to her in her native Albanian; A Nepalese Sherpa family that rolls about laughing in disbelief at hearing their foreign guest speak Sherpa. But do polyglots have a different brain from the rest of us? Simon travels to a specialised lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and undergoes a brain-scan himself, to find out.
Presenter: Simon Calder
Producer: Arlene Gregorius
Last on
Sat 24 Oct 202007:32GMT
BBC World Service except Australasia, East Asia, Europe and the Middle East & South Asia
Broadcasts
- Tue 2 Jul 201912:32GMTBBC World Service except News Internet
- Tue 2 Jul 201917:06GMTBBC World Service Australasia
- Tue 2 Jul 201921:06GMTBBC World Service
- Wed 3 Jul 201901:32GMTBBC World Service
- Sat 6 Jul 201908:32GMTBBC World Service except East Asia, Europe and the Middle East & South Asia
- Sun 7 Jul 201917:06GMTBBC World Service News Internet
- Wed 21 Oct 202010:32GMTBBC World Service
- Wed 21 Oct 202015:32GMTBBC World Service except East and Southern Africa & West and Central Africa
- Wed 21 Oct 202021:32GMTBBC World Service except Europe and the Middle East
- Wed 21 Oct 202022:32GMTBBC World Service Europe and the Middle East
- Sat 24 Oct 202001:32GMTBBC World Service News Internet, Europe and the Middle East, West and Central Africa & East Asia only
- Sat 24 Oct 202007:32GMTBBC World Service except Australasia, East Asia, Europe and the Middle East & South Asia
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