“One of the greatest challenges of the modern age is to break down the language barriers separating people from people. This is only to be achieved by giving access to the foreign language at an ever younger age. Not 12, not 10, not even five years old is too early for infants to come to grips with a foreign language. By harnessing modern technology, it should even soon be possible for infants as young as 6 months or even new-born babies emerging from the womb to be capable of a few meaningful statements in ,say, French or German – or even Mandarin Chinese!”
The words of Jo Speake, that tireless champion of early language learning and Director of the Institute of Language Learning (ILL). His claims that a child can be taught to speak a language competently by the age of six, given a level playing field (sic), were recently put to the test in an unusual encounter between two six year olds in a contest held, on neutral ground, at Reykavik, Iceland. With the eyes of the linguistic establishment upon them, the conversation between the two children, one Japanese and the other, originating from an until recently unknown aborigine tribe of South Western Australia, went something like this:
Hideka: Good morning, how are you?
Umbeki: Six years old.
Hideka: Where do you come from?
Umbeki: I’m fine thankyou.
Before the eyes of the thousands of experts and journalists present, an embarrassed Mr Speake was forced to admit that something ‘must have gone wrong in the prompting systems’ administered to the children during training.

During a recent test of one of Jo Speake’s even more radical claims that ‘a new-born baby can be taught to deliver a few perfectly pronounced phrases of Mandarin Chinese, Lithuanian or even the Afro-Indian dialect spoken by the natives of Papua, New Guinea, via a computer chip placed inside the womb of the mother during pregnancy’, things went awry when, in response to the Papuan prompter’s initial greetings to the babe, the child, after uttering a few incomprehensible gurgles, was instantly transformed into the welcoming screen of Windows XP version 6. “The wrong microchip was unfortunately placed inside the mother,” explained a red-faced Speake at the ensuing press conference. “There can of course be no possibility of legal action” he added hastily. “The mother naturally signed the necessary consent forms.” The dynamic phonologist wanted, however, to make it clear that teams of doctors and computer technicians were even now at work attempting to ‘re-program’ the child. “These are very complicated issues”, stressed Speake. “It’s not just a question of selecting the back arrow in the browser”. The implant of a second microchip, in the hope of ‘overwriting’ the first, was also currently under consideration. Meanwhile the child remains on life support for what might be a considerable time. Whether the mother has declined counselling remains uncertain to journalists at the present time .