If Bilingual Is Good, Is Trilingual Better?

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If Bilingual Is Good, Is Trilingual Better?
The New York Times - 20/3/2012

“Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter,” Yudhijit Bhattacharjee writes in an op-ed in The New York Times. “It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.”

But if being bilingual is good, what about being trilingual, as so many people in India are? Or even quadrilingual?

That’s hardly unusual in India, where someone may, speak, say, Punjabi and Hindi with their father’s family, Bengali with their mother’s and Hindi and English with their spouse and children. India’s 2001 census lists 122 languages, and bi- or trilingualism is so assumed that the census questionnaires ask respondents for their first, second and third languages.
Almost 20 percent of India’s population, some 240 million people, is multilingual, and millions are trilingual. (Sri Lanka, meanwhile, has proclaimed 2012 the “Year for a Trilingual Sri Lanka.”)

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/if-bilingual-is-good-is-trilingual-better/?scp=2&sq=languages&st=cse

[Tony]

It's sad that many areas of Europe are monolingual. This is, in my opinion, rather unnatural, especially nowadays where you can travel between many countries without even really noticing the state borders thanks to the Schengen treaty.