Multilingual Intelligence: The Politics of Poverty, Desire and Educational Reform

Abstract

This paper advocates a concept, “Multilingual Intelligence” (MI), for understanding human mind in economically challenging multilingual societies of developing nations. It examines the social, cognitive and intersubjective resources a multilingual society generates, and how these contribute to the development of human intellect. The attempt here is not to replace ontologically bounded imaginaries of old concepts and theories of intelligence with a new one, but to look at human intelligence from another lens of human capacity to trans-/multilanguage. This paper discusses two paradigmatic cases - a “Multilingual Urban Poor (MUP)” and a “Multilingual Tribal Child (MTC)”- to conceptualise Multilingual Intelligence. The logic for MI is derived from the observation that because multilinguality and orality are commonplace in most societies in India, a speaker constantly trans/multi-languages and transknowledges. She reads the minds and linguistic behaviour of the interlocutors before speaking, switches between languages to enhance mutual intelligibility and, perennially lives in the realm of translation. These social-cognitive activities generate an enormous amount of cognitive flexibility, working memory, and higher inferential and metacognitive skills, making it more possible for the children to be intersubjectively attuned. Multilingual children develop a worldview that is founded primarily on connections and not on separation. Extending the two paradigmatic cases to children from other multilingual communities, this paper reflexively engages with how linguistic diversity and constraints impact human intelligence and creativity, and, if so, what should be our politics of human psychology, education and liberation.