The kind of mental gymnastics that learning a language involves is good for us and for our ageing society. They help us to stay mentally active a bit longer.
- Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett
Is monolingualism harming us, both as individuals and as a society? Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Professor of French Philology and Linguistics, is leading a major interdisciplinary research project which looks at the value of languages for everything from health and well-being to social cohesion, diplomacy and conflict resolution.
The MEITS project (Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies) is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Open World Research Initiative and seeks to transform the health of the discipline of Modern Languages in the UK, attitudes towards multilingualism and language policy at home and abroad. The motivation for the project comes from an awareness that language learning in the UK is in a very difficult state. “There is a sense that modern languages are in crisis,” says Professor Ayres-Bennett, “and that traditional motivations to get people studying languages are not working. We need exciting new reasons to learn languages and to demonstrate the value of speaking more than one language.”
The project, which finishes in 2020, involves around 30 non-academic partners including schools and voluntary groups and has six interlocking research strands which investigate how the insights gained from stepping outside a single language, culture and mode of thought are vital to individuals and societies.
Professor Ayres-Bennett will speak about three areas of the research in a talk on Saturday 2 June at the Hay Festival for the Cambridge Series, now in its 10th year.
Image credit: MEITS project
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge