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Wow: 71% of Americans Find Bilinguals More Attractive!
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Too good to be true? According to a new survey by the language app Babbel, 71% of Americans--and 61% of Britons--believe that speaking more than one language makes someone more attractive. Olé!
Other highlights of the survey of 3,000 English speakers found that:
- Nine out of 10 admitted they had learned a new language in order to find love.
- One in eight admitted to fudging their language skills on a resume.
- One in four believed that speaking only English had held them back in their careers.
Sounds great. Maybe. After all, remember who did the survey: an online language learning company...
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Will Your Robot Be Prejudiced? Probably
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It seems that human bias is embedded in language. So much so that a research paper came out yesterday suggesting that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have the same biases we do.
The question is, will future robots act on their bias? This is not a joke. The researchers point out that according to their study, bias is so embedded in language (whether human or AI language) that you can predict the percentage of U.S. workers who are--say--engineers simply from human speech patterns.
This study is based on the monumental body of research that underlies the unconscious bias tests of Project Implicit®, a famous project run out of Harvard University. So this research seems solid.
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Check It Out: The First Huge Database of Non-Native English
Leave it to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to come up with this one: the world's first major database of English sentences by non-native English speakers.
Why bother? Well, researchers love to find stuff out, so of course they were digging for linguistic insights. But it turns out they hope the database will also help computers better understand the language of non-native speakers.
A fascinating step forward for global understanding!
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