Africa is a multilingual continent and many adults speak several languages fluently. An empirical study by a psycholinguist now shows that the roots of this multilingualism can be found in infancy: In Ghana, most babies grow up multilingually, with most of them coming into contact with two to six languages and just as many regular speakers of each language. The researchers also showed that the babies heard some languages primarily indirectly -- i.e. via radio, television or background conversations -- while other languages were used by their caregivers to directly communicate with them.
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