The Power of Language
Viorica Marian, Pelican Books, £22

THE subtitle of this intriguingly informative book reads, Multilingualism, Self and Society. It would be unfortunate if readers were put off by the author’s early definition of multilingualism as “not a fixed construct but a mental state in perpetual flux... constantly changing, based on the information the brain receives continuously from the auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, vestibular and proprioceptive inputs.”

Viorica Marian, a Romanian professor of psychology and specialist in communication sciences, speaks and has studied a dozen languages. The substance of her argument maintains that those fortunate enough to know and use more than one language, whether born into a multilingual family or through acquiring a language other than their vernacular, are equipped with advantages in understanding and therefore enabled to react to our world far beyond that of simply communicating with foreigners. 

Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” has been one of the bedrocks of modern psychology and although Marian recognises that “language does not fully determine thought, it is one of the key factors that... influence how we think and who we are.”