The Linguist

Chartered Institute of Linguists What the papers say… Who Cares if Britain's Eurovision Entry Has German Lyrics?, 9/3/26 If anything, this gesture on behalf of Look Mum No Computer, i.e. Sam Battle, should be seen as a bilateral act of goodwill toward our German-speaking kin… The flustered reaction to the news that this year's UK Eurovision entry is partly sung in German [shows] many people seem to have lost their heads… A Eurovision entry which has a few words in German is not something that should worry us unduly. Rather than representing the dilution of our heritage, it should be seen as a homage to it. 'The War Leaked into Every Lesson': Learning Ukrainian in a country under siege, 4/8/26 The character [Ї], which expresses the sound 'yi' – as in Kyiv (Київ) – is absent from the Russian variant of the alphabet, and thus operates as a subtle signifier of allegiance. In occupied Mariupol, in 2022, the letter Ї was seen scrawled in chalk on the streets – a single letter as an act of defiance. I enjoy the fact that in the transliteration of my surname, Гіґґінс [Higgins], there is another Ukrainian- only letter, Ґ, which, from its jaunty upturned serif, one can tell is the rare hard g, most commonly employed for loan words. The latest from the languages world Philip Harding-Esch reports on new research suggesting multilingualism keeps the brain young New research suggests that speaking more than one language may keep the brain measurably younger. Researchers presented their findings at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Forum in Barcelona in July. Using a 'brain ageing clock' built from magnetoencephalography (MEG) scans, they compared people from the multilingual Basque region who spoke between one and four languages. Bilingual speakers had brains that appeared around six years younger than expected for their age; trilingual speakers, seven years younger; and those who spoke four languages, up to 13 years younger. Lead researcher Dr Lucia Amoruso said the effect "matters as a gradient" – i.e. it's not simply about whether you are bilingual, but how proficient you are and how early you started. Much of the media framed it as good news for anyone thinking about picking up a new language in midlife, but Professor Eef Hogervorst advised caution. Writing for The Conversation, he pointed out that while multilingualism appears to delay dementia diagnoses by up to five years, it does not decrease overall risk – possibly because the NEWS & EDITORIAL extra vocabulary and problem-solving skills simply mask early signs of decline. This tracks with the British Academy's 2019 research into the cognitive benefits of multilingualism, which found measurable advantages, such as in creativity, but warned that wider cognitive benefits are "complex and inconsistent". A study out of NYU, published in The Journal of Neuroscience this summer, offered further clues as to the mechanisms of bilingualism in the brain. Also using MEG brain scans, it found that bilingual speakers don't run separate grammatical systems for each language. Instead, the same neural 'engine' processes grammar in both languages simultaneously; evidence, perhaps, that language is "built from neural computations that transcend any one language". Whatever the final verdict, language learning has proven to be a source of wellbeing in later life. Recent qualitative research from the Glasgow-based charity Lingo Flamingo, which teaches languages to care home residents and people living with dementia, shows that the classes foster friendship, reminiscence, confidence and a renewed sense of identity. AUTUMN 2026 The Linguist 5 Taiwan Travelogue, A Love Letter to Food and Adventure, Wins International Booker Prize, 19/5/26 Elaborately framed as the translation of a rediscovered travel memoir, complete with fictional footnotes, many readers thought it was about a genuine historic text… [It] centres on a fictional Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, who is on a government-sponsored tour of Taiwan with a Taiwanese translator, O Chizuru, whom she falls in love with. A font of youth? © SHUTTERSTOCK

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