As the new year begins, it’s worth considering which practices survive without applause or recognition.
(also posted to Substack)
I. Polyglotism as Performance
This might be the year we stop being impressed by polyglots.
Not because people have stopped learning languages, or because multilingualism suddenly became fake or irrelevant. Rather, the conditions that once made polyglotism legible as spectacle are quietly collapsing.
For a long time, polyglotism online functioned almost entirely through moments of surprise (or shock, if you will). These moments were compelling because they compressed invisible effort into algorithm-friendly moments of payoff. They were easy to collect, circulate, recognize, remix, and share. One shocked native became ten, fifteen, twenty, then a compilation, always pushing into new areas. Depth here was never the point. Breadth was. Spectacle was.
Polyglotism fit neatly into a Situationist definition of spectacle: an accumulation of images that stands in for lived experience. A spectacle does not require veracity, verisimilitude, or vulnerability; it requires visibility. And language snippets—short, performable, and culturally charged—were perfect material. Online polyglot culture may not have invented this logic, but it did flourish inside it.
The problem with spectacles, though, is that they can be fragile. They rely on contrast. And more and more, contrast is disappearing.
With increasingly seamless AI translation, earbuds that mediate conversation in real time, and multimodal communication that privileges images and emojis over syntax, the visible difference between internalized language and mediated language is shrinking. When everyone can approximate fluency, fluency stops functioning as spectacle. The shock fades, not because the skill vanished but because it no longer reads as rare from the outside.
II. The Question That Never Dies
This shift exposes something else that polyglot culture has been circling for years without naming—that many of its most persistent questions can receive only constrained answers under spectacle logic.
Take one of the most unending debates in language learning: Can you learn more than one language at the same time? The reason this question has been debated ad nauseam isn’t because it lacks an answer. The answer comes down to what the learner is trying to accomplish.
If a learner wishes to garner attention as part of a spectacle, then learning two, three, four, five languages simultaneously is possible. The learning should focus on the accumulation of recognized routines (especially short, repeatable dialogues), the memorization of canned phrases, the mastery of early-stage vocabulary, and so on. In this framework, simultaneity is impressive and accumulation matters.
If, however, depth is the goal, the answers change entirely.
Depth depends on time, attentional energy, and long horizons. It requires tolerating long plateaus where progress is real but not visible. It means accepting that meaningful change often happens internally well before it can be displayed externally, if at all (reading novels, for instance). Under such conditions, the answer is no longer that learning two, three, four languages simultaneously is possible. The answer becomes a new question: How much are you willing to sustain (possibly alone) and for how long?
True linguistic inhabitation, the slow rewiring of the brain that comes from existing inside a new system, demands more limits than the spectacle. This is why multi-year timelines don’t feel strange when spectacle drops away. It’s no longer about how much of a language you can learn in 24 hours, a week, a month. It becomes necessary to think in five-year arcs, not six-month challenges.
III. What Remains When the Shock Fades
And this is where the real risk of the spectacle emerges, and where we may start to see the death of the polyglot as a cultural figure.
People will likely not stop needing languages. But with the tools we have now, and a tendency toward shallow rewards, image accumulation, and fast dopamine hits, the danger is that people will stop imagining a reason to bother with languages at all. When attention is fragmented everywhere, when all the polyglot content has been spectacularized and reenacted, when interpretation becomes instant for so many, then language learning loses its cultural soil. Not because it is useless, but because it no longer aligns with how meaning is processed.
Polyglotism didn’t cause this flattening, but it participated in it by leaning into spectacle. And now, when spectacle means less by virtue of saturation and loss of reality, the practice is being forced to answer a harder question.
What remains when impressiveness disappears?
To my mind, language learning, stripped of spectacle, becomes slower, quieter, and less legible. It looks less like accumulation and more like discipline. Less like identity and more like sustained attention under constraint (the very skill we are collectively losing). When unperformed, it offers no shortcuts and no immediate payoff. Nevertheless, it can change how a person thinks from the inside.
So perhaps the question for the coming year is not how many languages a polyglot can speak, or how to learn them efficiently, or whether we can do it all at once. Perhaps the question is simpler, and harder.
What kind of depth are we still willing to choose when we aren’t incentivized to choose something shallow?