1. The advantages of speaking a second language

1. The advantages of speaking a second language

They are hard to measure. But it is a good idea anyway

Just a few generations ago, speaking two languages was supposed to be bad for you. Tests in America found that bilingual people had lower iqs, which seemed evidence enough. Later it became clear that those surveys were really measuring the material poverty of immigrants; members of such families were more likely to be undernourished and understimulated, not to mention the obvious fact that they often sat the tests in a language that was not their best.

How things have changed. In the past decade it has become almost common knowledge that bilingualism is good for you—witness articles such “Why Bilinguals are Smarter” and “The Amazing Benefits of Being Bilingual” by the New York Times and the bbc. Stacks of research papers have suggested that two-tongued people enjoy a variety of non-linguistic advantages. Most notably, they have shown that bilinguals get dementia on average four years later than monolinguals, and that they have an edge in “ executive control”—a basket of abilities that aid people doing complex tasks, including focusing attention, ignoring irrelevant information and updating working memory.

Why bilingualism would enhance these capabilities is unclear. Researchers hypothesise that having two languages means suppressing one when speaking the other, a kind of constant mental exercise that makes the brain healthier. This in particular is thought to be behind the finding of a later onset of dementia.

But as intellectual pendulums do, this one has begun to swing again, against the “bilingual advantage”. Though many papers have identified such a bonus, many more have tried and failed to replicate those studies. Roberto Filippi of University College London and his colleagues have spent five years testing more than 600 people, from seven to 80 years old and including some who oscillate between two languages. They could find no statistically significant advantage in any age cohort.

In response to the scepticism, researchers who believe in the advantage have refined their studies—now acknowledging that, beneath their common trait, bilingual people use their languages in varying ways that may account for the incongruent previous results. Does speaking two very distinct languages have a different effect from speaking two very similar ones? What about two dialects? Does speaking more than two provide any additional benefit? Does it matter if subjects live among people who speak their first language or their second?

A recent study by four researchers at the University of the Balearic Islands is a good example. They studied 112 bilinguals using three criteria: the age they acquired a second language; fluency in their two languages (most are not equally adept in both); and the frequency with which they switch between the two options. Frequency of switching, it turned out, was the variable that correlated best with improved executive control. Unlike Mr Filippi’s, other studies have hinted that frequent switching may be a good predictor of the bilingual advantage.

On balance, it seems that if the dividend is real, it is subtle and affected by many other factors. Though wealthy parents have been taken by the notional leg-up, hiring foreign nannies for their offspring and so on, it may be poorer individuals who get the biggest benefit. A study in Hyderabad, for instance, reproduced the finding of a four-year delay in the onset of dementia among bilinguals—except that the gap was six years for those test cases who were illiterate. If switching languages is healthy mental exercise, other highly skilled, cognitively demanding kinds of labour are likely to provide good work-outs, too. People who do other forms of mental multitasking all the time may not get such a big lift from bilingualism, if they get any at all.

The bottom line is that learning another language (or teaching a child one) sometimes confers an intellectual boost, though not always. But that has never been the main reason to do it. A second language expands the number of people you can talk to. It adds to the ways you can say things, and so offers a second point of view on the whole business of expression. Bilingualism may help you understand other people; one study found that bilingual children are better at grasping other perspectives, perhaps because they are always keeping track of who speaks what, a regular reminder that everyone is different. Finally, speaking a second language less well than your first supplies another kind of useful practice: it is a constant exercise in humility.

2. A race to the top of the world

In the 1930s great-power rivalry played out in the Himalayas

In 1933, when Maurice Wilson decided to pilot a single-propeller aeroplane from London to the Himalayas, crash land on a 14, 000-foot glacier and ascend to the summit of Mount Everest by himself, he did not reckon on the forbidding challenge of British bureaucracy. After flying more than 5, 000 miles (8, 050 kilometres), the amateur aviator and mountaineer was denied a permit to cross Nepali airspace and grounded in British India. Undeterred, Wilson secretly slipped across the border into Tibet on foot, disguised as a Buddhist monk. The last entry in his diary, found near his body 2, 300 metres below Everest’s peak, reads: “Off again, gorgeous day. ”

Persistently optimistic—and perhaps completely mad—Wilson shared the determined idealism of the world’s best mountaineers. In his lively new book, “The World Beneath Their Feet”, Scott Ellsworth profiles the single-minded climbers who scaled the Himalayas’ tallest peaks in the 1930s. With war on the horizon, teams from Britain, the United States and Germany raced to plant their national flags on the “roof of the world”.

By the 1930s high-altitude mountaineering had become as much a source of national prestige as space exploration would be in the 1960s. “We ought not to treat the climbing of Mount Everest as a domestic issue, ” argued a piece in theLondon Morning Post in 1936. “It is an issue of National and Imperial importance. ” In Berlin the Reichssportfü hrer demanded the conquest of Nanga Parbat “for the glory of Germany”; Nazi officials wondered whether mountaineering missions could facilitate high-altitude aircraft tests over the Himalayas.

The 23 expeditions undertaken between 1931 and 1939 invariably entailed extreme trials—among them perilous icefalls, pounding hail and fingers and toes lost to frostbite. The British Everest expedition of 1933 began with a 300-mile walk from Darjeeling to Base Camp in Tibet, where one climber felt the cold “must be that of interstellar space”. Not that these efforts were entirely without luxury. The failed French Himalayan expedition of 1936 was weighed down by eight tonnes of supplies, including 72 fillettes of champagne and “countless” tins of foie gras.

Many of these adventures ended in tragedy. Seven climbers and nine porters were buried by an avalanche during a German expedition to Nanga Parbat in 1937; it was, at the time, the worst disaster in the history of mountaineering. But for those who succeeded, the payoff was astonishing. “The horizon surrounded us in one unbroken ring, ” wrote the American climber Terris Moore in his diary after reaching the summit of Minya Konka, “and I fancied that I could see the curvature of the Earth. ”

Mr Ellsworth presents a gripping history, despite the occasional cliché (“Whether or not mad dogs and Englishmen could stay out of the noonday sun was debatable. But Englishmen…simply couldn’t keep out of the hills”). He takes care to describe the experiences and contributions of Nepali sherpas—including a young man named Tenzing Norgay—who were hired to support expeditions. Even as European and American mountaineers relied on their expertise, they typically maintained strict divisions between sherpa and sahib. Sherpas were nearly always allocated inferior equipment and lodging.

When war broke out in 1939, the mountaineers were forced to abandon the Himalayas for the front. But the race was merely on hold. In 1953, after seven failed attempts by British expeditions, Tenzing and Sir Edmund Hillary made the first successful climb to the summit of Everest. From the mountaintop, Tenzing waved the flag of the United Nations. “I like to think that our victory was not only for ourselves”, he reflected, “but for all men everywhere. ”