Swedish study on people who can speak many languages.

The Swedish Central Bank's Jubilee Fund is financing a programme on advanced second language use. People who have learnt Swedish well enough to be perceived as native speakers maintain nuances in their language use that separate them from people with Swedish as their mother tongue, and our research seeks to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon. We study individual factors such as natural language talent, but also whether there is a critical age for language learning. In collaboration with several language departments, we study grammatical and lexical difficulties in advanced learners of French, English, Spanish and Italian.

Other projects include the study of polyglots – individuals who can learn up to 50-60 languages – and bilingual people with dementia. We also carry out sociolinguistic studies which reveal attitudes towards people who speak with an accent. In transnational multilingualism, we study the relationship between a lingua franca, global English, and an indigenous language. Regular field studies are conducted in countries in southern Africa, where Portuguese and English are the dominant languages in school, in order to study the effects of this situation on the pupils, and the countries' language policy, etc.

http://www.su.se/english/research/leading-research-areas/bilingualism-and-second-language-acquisition-1.60413