Bar-Ilan University
Parshat Hashavua Study Center
Parshat Noah 5776/October 17, 2015
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From the Tower of Babel to a Global World:
The Challenge of Multilingualism
By Miriam Faust
“Everyone on earth had the same language and the same words” (Gen. 11:1). This is how
verbal communication between human beings is described in the story of the Tower of
Babel, before mankind was dispersed. Many commentaries have been written on this
verse, but the plain sense seems to say that all mankind spoke one language, apparently a
mother-tongue that was common to all.
According to Rashi, this language was Hebrew: “The same language—the holy tongue”
(Rashi, loc. cit.). Speaking the same language was what made the communal enterprise of
the generation of the Tower of Babel possible, making themselves a name: “Let us…make
a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11:4). In response, the Holy One, blessed be He, caused there

Prof. Faust is Full Professor in the Psychology Department, and currently Rector of Bar-Ilan.
to be many languages, thus making it hard for them to communicate with one another
(Gen. 11:8-9):
Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall
not understand one another’s speech. Thus the Lord scattered them from
there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confounded [Heb.
balal, a play on Babel] the speech of the whole earth.
The new situation brought on by the sin of the generation building the tower of Babel
continues to exist to this very day. Most people in the modern world find it insufficient to
have mastery of just one language—their mother tongue—and must struggle with the
challenge of becoming multilingual and acquiring proficiency other languages as well. In
our global world, characterized by migration, it is not just an advantage to have command
of more than one language; Multilingualism may prove crucial for mobility,
communication, use of the internet, academic studies, personal and professional
development, and much more.
All this has given rise to extensive study of multilingualism. Many studies attempt to
discover the process of acquiring a foreign language and explain the reasons many people
have difficulty learning other languages, by examining the nature and differences between
brain mechanisms associated with acquiring at mother tongue as opposed to acquiring
other languages later in life.
All human languages known to us share a similar basic logical organization, especially in
the terms of the form of language. This includes the laws governing systems of sound and
pronunciation (phonology), the internal structure of words (morphology), and the
structure of sentences (syntax). Likewise, all human languages, including sign language,
are processed primarily in specific areas on the left side of the brain. This fact attests that
all languages are based originally on common verbal brain mechanisms. Nevertheless,
there are differences among languages in terms of the specific characterization of their
systems; for example, at least some in the phonology of each language are unique to it and
different from all other languages (as expressed in the existence of different accents).
Aside from differences between languages, research has also shown significant differences
between one’s first language and other languages, attesting that they are built on different
mechanisms in the brain, at least in part. For example, there is a critical age for acquiring
a mother-tongue, and someone who has not acquired it by that age is likely to show
numerous difficulties in the areas of phonology and morphology or even to be incapable of
acquiring any language at all beyond the level of isolated words.
In contrast, the ability to learn a foreign language (after acquiring a mother-tongue) has
no age limitations in principle, although it may decline at a more advanced age. Another
difference is the cerebral representation of a mother-tongue as opposed to other
languages: research provides evidence that one’s mother-tongue is focused on the left side
of the brain, whereas other languages show broader and more scattered cerebral
representation. Also, the adverse effects on command of one’s mother-tongue as opposed
to later acquired languages, in the wake of brain injury, are generally not uniform.
Another especially interesting phenomenon regarding multilingualism, further reinforcing
the distinction between mother-tongues and later acquired languages, is the considerable
difficulty observed in a certain fraction of the population in learning foreign languages.
Almost all people manage to acquire a mother-tongue with great ease, even when growing
up in a linguistically poor environment, but there is great individual variance in ability to
learn foreign languages. There are more than a few people who, while able to master a
mother-tongue without noticeable difficulty and possessing a perfectly normal or even
high intelligence level, nevertheless have great difficulty learning foreign languages and
are not even capable of attaining reasonable proficiency.
The great inter-personal differences in ability to learn foreign languages, as opposed to the
extremely small variance in ability to acquire a mother-tongue are apparently based on the
idea that foreign languages use a secondary brain system that is “superimposed” on the
system originally designed for acquiring a mother-tongue. One of the consequences of
using brain mechanisms not specifically designed for the task would be to increase the
variance between one person and another in ability to learn a foreign language.
A similar phenomenon also exists with respect to writing. The great variance in ability to
master reading and writing, and the significant number of people who have difficulty with
these disciplines is apparently related to this being a developmentally later system which
also uses linguistic systems originally intended for another purpose—processing spoken
language.
According to current research, interpersonal differences in ability to acquire foreign
languages are largely related to differences in efficiency of innate brain systems that
process sounds—i.e., phonology. These studies found that in comparison with subjects
who succeed in learning a foreign language, those subjects who had difficulty learning a
foreign language evinced lesser ability of the brain to distinguish between speech sounds
and to remember a series of sounds in order. These subjects also tended to experience
more incidents of having a “word on the tip of the tongue,” and had difficulty retrieving
from their memory the phonetic structure of words whose meaning they knew. They also
made less use of phonetic hints.
It is known today that human infants are born with the ability to register any potential
system of phonology, but their brains become “tuned” to the system of sounds of the
mother-tongue to which they are exposed. In the first year of life, infants focus on
identifying the important phonetic differences of their mother-tongue, and progress from
babbling sounds that are not specific to the mother tongue to babbling that resembles the
sounds of the mother-tongue. Apparently, infants born with a less proficient system for
phonological processing succeed in learning the sounds of their mother-tongue, since the
relevant brain mechanisms are tuned to them from the outset, but when their brain is
asked to cope with new and different phonetic systems necessary for learning a foreign
language, they are likely to develop difficulties.
Thus current research corroborates the existence of differences between mother-tongue
and foreign languages and provides developmental explanations of these differences. The
findings fit in with the idea of a transition from a pan-human language based on
specialized brain mechanisms and enabling a single mother-tongue, as described in the
story of the Tower of Babel, to the challenge of learning additional languages using brain
mechanisms originally specialized for acquiring a mother-tongue.
People who have trouble coping with this challenge are likely to experience marked
difficulties adjusting in the multilingual society that has characterized our world ever
since “the Lord confounded the speech of the whole earth.” Nevertheless, at times it
seems that modern society is returning to a single global language, as many languages in
the world die out while English becomes the language common to vast groups of
mankind. This calls to mind the interpretation in Torah Temimah of “one tongue”:
It appears that until the generation of the dispersal each people had its
own language, for it says “according to their languages” (Gen. 10:20, 31), and
the Holy Tongue which was common to all. When they were building [the
tower] they agreed to use only that language, and then it became forgotten
by them.1
Translated by Rachel Rowen
1
For further reading, see the following sources:
Borodkin, K. and Faust, M., “Naming abilities in low proficiency second language learners,” Journal of
Learning Disabilities (2012), DOI:10.1177/0022219412453769.
Jacoby, H., Goldstein, A. and Faust, M., “Electrophysiological correlates of speech perception mechanisms
and individual differences in second language attainment,” Psychophysiology (2011), DOI:10.1111/j.14698986.2011.01227.x.