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The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa review – enlightening and astonishing

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/11/the-bilingual-brain-albert-costa-language-review

Does speaking more than one language alter your brain? The findings from a lifetime of research are revelatory

Over the past century, perceptions of bilingualism have swung from one extreme to the other. For much of the immediate postwar years, it was thought that a toddler’s brain would struggle to cope with two languages (it would handicap school progress, experts said, and some even believed it could lead to schizophrenia). But from the 1960s onwards, increasingly scientific research (coupled, perhaps, with a greater appreciation of cultural difference) pushed the pendulum a long way in the other direction. It’s now fairly common to hear some extraordinary claims about the benefits of bilingualism.

Albert Costa (a Catalan-Spanish bilingual) died in 2018, and this book is a great testimony to his lifetime of research into the subject. Although peppered with a few technical aspects of neuroscience, it’s very readable: the prose is gentle, anecdotal, witty, personal and – despite the many controversies – balanced. He doesn’t deride monoglots (they have advantages too), but simply invites us to wonder what happens if you double up on what is already an extraordinary human ability – language.

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