How Tequila Helps You Speak a Foreign Language Better

Speaking a foreign language can be one of the most ego-threatening situations you may find yourself in. All of your self-confidence suddenly dissolves in the toxins produced by your struggling brain with conjugations, leaving you feeling small, stupid, and useless.

If you have ever found yourself in that situation, you probably know about the escape route called "go have a drink and put an end to this agony." Before, not after. For some reason, alcohol - with all its well-known negative effects on memory, learning, and attention - seems to help people speak a foreign language better.

But is that really the case?

Does alcohol helps you to speak a foreign language better?

This belief has lived forever in the minds of avid language learners. However, you can imagine the skepticism with which it was received in the scientific world.

Alcohol, better pronunciation in a foreign language? Rrrrrrrrright. I would rather believe in leprechauns.

Nevertheless, in 1972, a bold team of psychologists led by Alexander Guiora decided to test this hypothesis and explore the marvelous effects of alcohol on the foreign language pronunciation skills of students from the University of Michigan. [1]

Alcohol Effects on Speaking a Foreign Language

This research team chose about thirty undergrads and offered them some cocktails. Depending on individual luck, each participant gulped down either one, one-and-a-half, two, and three ounces of liquor or a “virgin” version of the beverage.

I must say that the professors went about the bartending art very seriously. They selected 90-proof varieties of rum and cognac and garnished their cocktails “with a cherry and a twist of lemon peel”. (No joke, I’m citing the original article here).

Once again, applause to the faculty.

After enjoying their cocktails, the students were taken away and tested on their ability to pronounce Thai words. None of them had spoken Thai before (and it is not the easiest language to learn in any case). But that’s precisely what the scientists were assessing: the ability to pick up a native-speaker pronunciation in a random foreign language.

And that’s right! Acute doses of alcohol (namely, 1.5 oz) made “impaired” students speak a foreign language better compared to sober ones! Precision mattered, however. Just another 0.5 oz dissolved in the learners’ bloodstream already affected their pronunciation adversely.

But hold on before pulling out your jigger; there is a second part to this story.

The Dutch Courage: Real and Perceived Effects of Alcohol

Another paper on alcohol and language learning came out fairly recently (in 2017). Maastricht University in the Netherlands decided to replicate Guiora’s study and dig a bit deeper into the causes of “the jigger effect”. [2]

They found 50 bilingual PSYC students, all native speakers of German with a decent proficiency level in Dutch. The history repeated itself. The lucky half of participants enjoyed a long drink (Smirnoff & Bitter Lemon, uh-huh) while their less lucky counterparts tasted chilled water. After that, both groups had a short one-to-one interview in Dutch… about animal testing. (I wouldn’t want to deal with this even after a shot.)

When it was over, the students were asked to fill a self-assessment questionnaire on how they felt about their foreign language abilities in general and pronunciation in particular. Researchers really hoped that “drunkards” would overestimate their Dutch conversation skills. This would turn the “drinking-leads-to-fluency” phenomenon from a scientific mystery into a mere perceptual bias of impaired language learners.

But what a disappointment! Both groups were equally precise in their self-reports. Thus, the theory that alcohol simply plays with learners' perception failed to prove right. In reality, alcohol does much, much more...

(Also, if reading these kinds of studies makes you think that you chose the wrong university to study at, you are not alone.)

How Alcohol Makes You Speak a Foreign Language Better?

Both studies demonstrate that a small dose of alcohol helps achieve a native-like pronunciation, increases conversational fluency, and leads to better performance on oral production tasks.

But I'm pretty sure you've heard a totally different story, like how alcohol drugs the hypothalamus and leads to executive function impairment, shutdowns of inhibitor control, and memory blackouts. And all of this is supported by scientific studies as well.

So what's the matter with this sudden enhancement of your Spanish conversational fluency after a shot of tequila in that shady bar on the periphery of Mexico City?

Alcohol, Ego Permeability, and Language Learning

It doesn't have much to do with the executive function per se (at the prescribed 1.5 oz level, of course). Rather, alcohol alters your ego functioning, or more specifically, a psychological variable called "ego permeability." The latter is responsible for empathy (which is your ability to "give up separateness of identity from others").

Interestingly enough, empathy as a personal trait and the ability to "speak like a native" were found to be positively correlated. And it makes perfect sense. Learning another language is, in some way, like taking on a new identity. It comes down to associating yourself with a new culture and accepting new behaviors.

And this is where this shot of tequila comes into play.

By lowering inhibitions, alcohol temporarily alters ego boundaries, which, in turn, makes you a more empathic person, at least for a while! But during this "little while," you enjoy all the benefits of individuals with high ego permeability, including more authentic pronunciation.

This positive picture should be followed by a word of warning, though.

It all depends: one shot later

First of all, it all boils down to choosing the right shot glass and downing a precise portion of alcohol.

And this portion is not six pints of Heineken, sorry.

You may speak a foreign language better after having a cocktail containing 1 to 1.5 oz of your favorite liquor. What you don't want to do, however, is ask a bartender to repeat. Already, at 2 oz, the performance of Guiora's students dropped way below the "control" level. And even if they felt that Thai words flew out of their mouth like birds on a sunny day, in reality, it certainly wasn't the case.

So being drunk doesn't make you fluent, believe it or not.

Second, small doses of alcohol do loosen your tongue but only temporarily. No one, obviously, even thought about measuring how long these marvelous effects tend to last for, which is a terrible oversight, of course. But what can you do?

So instead of blindly betting on a magic potion, you're better off dealing with the problem responsibly. And there are indeed a number of ways to lower inhibition together with the affective filter in foreign language speaking situations. Practicing with an online language teacher, going to the Polyglot club, or just routinely annoying your Spanish-speaking friends with "¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás?" are only some of such ways.

And accepting the fact that it's fine to feel stupid and useless when you speak your L2 will do you even more of a favor.