More rarely, divergence can be lethal. When, in 1937, the Dominican President, Rafael Trujillo, wanted to ethnically cleanse his country of Haitians, he is said to have asked those carrying out his orders to use a linguistic test to identify them. In Dominican Spanish the word for parsley, perejil, is spoken with a rolled “r.” Haitians, who spoke F

difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children83 when constant 9–5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six m