It has long been part of popular culture that drinking alcoholic beverages can help us to better master languages that are not our mother tongue. In fact, there are cases in which this belief has reached the extreme, and proof of this is that on Facebook there is a page with more than 100,000 followers called “Going Drunk Increases My Ability to Speak Other Languages”.

It is already known that many of these beliefs that pass from mouth to ear have more of a myth than reality, and in particular, the idea that intoxicating ourselves with spirits can make us speak better languages is more of a joke than the truth (in this state we even have trouble pronouncing some surnames, let alone using grammatical rules with which we are not very familiar).

However… what happens when the consumption of alcohol is moderate? Could this have a positive impact on our command of languages that we do not speak natively ? A recent study suggests that the answer is yes.

Alcohol: neurological and psychological effects

That alcohol has negative effects on the brain has been known for a long time. The amount of money that moves the industry that markets these types of products has not made the way in which these substances harm us in multiple ways go unnoticed, although certain alcoholic products are better advertised than others.

For example, the brains of people with a history of alcoholism tend to be somewhat less voluminous and the neural interconnections of some of their areas are less numerous than in healthy brains; this is noted, among other things, in their ability to make use of memory, as they have a damaged hippocampus, and in their management of emotions and impulses in real time.

However, beyond the direct effects that alcohol ingested in high quantities has on the nervous system, it is not unreasonable that in moderate quantities there are certain advantages related to this class of products. In particular, a team of scientists from the University of Maastricht led by Fritz Renner set out to test whether drinking a little alcohol temporarily improves the way in which a recently learned language is spoken (in adults, of course).

This research, rather than discovering an advantage associated with alcohol consumption, serves to better understand the mechanisms involved in the use of a foreign language.

The Effect of Alcohol on Foreign Language Speaking

To conduct this research, Renner and his colleagues used an experimental study with 50 volunteers whose native language is German. These people were German students in their second year of their psychology studies at the University of Maastrich, a city that many people in Germany attend due to its proximity to the border between the two countries.

In addition, in order to pass from Germany to the University of Maastricht, you have to stop first for a level test of Dutch , so practically all these students had a level of this language that allowed them to speak it.

To begin with the experimental conditions, the volunteers were divided into two groups: one of them drank 250 ml. of sparkling water, and the other drank the same amount of lemonade with a little vodka , enough to reach a blood alcohol concentration of 0.04% (the amount of ml. of alcohol each person drank depended on their sex and body mass so that everyone had that 0.04%).

A quarter of an hour after the drinks were consumed, at a stage in the experiment when the alcohol should already have passed into the blood and brain, the volunteers were asked to discuss the animal experiment in Dutch for a couple of minutes. From this exercise, two native Dutch speakers were asked to score the degree to which the Germans expressed themselves well or badly, offering scores on different parameters: fluency, pronunciation, vocabulary, word choice, clarity and overall quality of speech . In addition, the Germans had to score themselves on how well or badly they had spoken Dutch.

The surprising result

What Renner and his colleagues hoped was that the alcohol would make the Germans benevolent in scoring their Dutchman’s quality on the test, while the Dutch would not give a higher score, but a lower one, to those who had consumed the vodka. In other words, they believed that the main effect of the spirit drink would be to affect the way a person appreciates the quality of his or her own foreign language skills.

However, the results obtained offered a very different conclusion. Germans who had consumed vodka did not score better than those who had drunk soda , but overall they received significantly higher scores from the Dutch, both in overall speech quality and pronunciation.

Why does this happen? Disinhibition

Although the effects of alcohol on the nervous system are negative, it is reasonable that in very moderate quantities the harmful effects of this substance are hardly noticed and that, instead, other psychological consequences emerge which, although also discrete, are of a positive nature. The advantages of a slight disinhibition can be an example .

When we express ourselves in a foreign language, the fear of making a fool of ourselves by pronouncing certain words can have the effect of self-fulfilling prophecy, that is to say, it can lead us to pronounce things in a loud or imprecise way so that we are barely heard. A few drops of vodka could make these fears practically disappear, leaving us free to express ourselves in an intuitive and genuine way.