Indians remain agile longer because of being invariably bilingual

For those who marvel at the Indian talent of multitasking — best displayed by shopkeepers and dhaba waiters — the clue could lie in most of us being polyglots. It is rare to find most people fluent in more than a single language in most places. In India, that is the norm, with 22 constitutionally-decreed languages and thousands of dialects. More recently, the addition of a third factor, communication technology, has even led to the birth of new written languages such as Romanagri, which is Hindi and other Hindi-based Indian languages in Roman script. The need to communicate via western keypads will undoubtedly spawn many more fusion languages in India along with appropriate portmanteau words to describe them. Only, the usual criticism about bowdlerisation may now be dimmed by the prospect of lifelong bilingualism being beneficial for ageing brains and guarding against Alzheimer’s and dementias. A recent study by a US university asserts that older people who have grown up speaking more than one language were better at task-switching than their monolingual contemporaries though it is a skill that usually declines with age, indicating more active brains.

As this study bears out another earlier study by an Israeli university five years ago, it will also put language purists in a quandary. After all, the proliferation of Hinglish and other Indo-English hybrids could then be seen as healthy developments since fluency is predicated on knowledge of at least two, or more, tongues. It was conventional wisdom that Indians think fast and multitask because of endemic adversity: the situation demands and fosters it. If the real catalyst is a preponderance of polyglots, however, scientists should consider a stint here studying Indians. Exposure to multilingual Indians may help their brains too.