More than half of the world’s population speaks more than one language—but there is no consistent method for defining “bilingual” or “multilingual.” This makes it difficult to accurately assess proficiency across multiple languages and to describe language backgrounds accurately. 

A team of New York University researchers has now created a calculator that scores multilingualism, allowing users to see how multilingual they actually are and which language is their dominant one. 

The work, which uses innovative formulas to build the calculator, is reported in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

“Multilingualism is a very broad label,” explains Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, an assistant professor of psychology and neural science at NYU and the paper’s senior author. “These new formulas provide a clear, evidence-based way to understand your language strengths and how multilingual you truly are, bringing scientific clarity to an everyday part of life for millions of people.”

The calculator works in nearly 50 languages, including American Sign Language, and allows users to fill in an unlisted language. 

Blanco-Elorrieta and Xuanyi Jessica Chen, an NYU doctoral student and the paper’s lead author, developed the formulas—embedded in a multilingual calculator that users can deploy to measure their multilingualism and language dominance—that are drawn from two primary variables:

• Age of language acquisition for listening, reading, speaking, and writing
• Self-rated language proficiency for listening, reading, speaking, and writing

The calculator then yields a multilingualism score, which indicates how multilingual a person is on a scale from monolingual to perfect polyglot. The language-dominance is separately tabulated by calculating the difference in ability between languages.

COPY III

IMAGE CREDIT: NASA.