Multilingualism Is Not A Curse, part 1

Transcription by Aileen Marshall: contact her at aileentranscribes@gmail.com.

Sadie:                          This is Accentricity, a podcast where I examine the eccentricities of language and identity.

This is part one of a two-part episode about multilingualism. In this part I’ll be asking is it really confusing for a kid to grow up in a multilingual household? Or can having more than one language in your life actually do you some good?

Why don’t all humans speak the same language? The Old Testament explains it like this: once upon a time, after the great flood, we did. Then, as humans so often do, we got a bit big for our boots. We decided to build a city and a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. God punished us by splitting us up into lots of different language groups, making it so that we couldn’t understand each other. We were cursed with multilingualism. The curse of Babel.

In my time researching language in education, I’ve come across this idea again and again in different forms: that multilingualism is a curse or, if not a curse, then at least an inconvenience.

                                    In Episode 2 you heard a bit from my friend Emilia who’s seven. She lives with her dad Kyle, her mum Ula, and her brother Daniel. Her dad’s Scottish and her mum’s Polish, and at home they speak a mixture of Polish, English, Gaelic and Scots.

Kyle:                           When we had moved in to Govanhill, one of the stories I remember was Ula being ill and asking me to take Emilia to a kind of drop-in session to get Emilia weighed and measured. I think it was in one of the local church halls and you go along and there’s the local health visitor there doing the weighing and measuring. I remember going along to that and the health visitor at the session asking me some questions and -- “oh, your wife is Polish? Oh, well, you need make sure that your wife speaks only English then to your daughter because if she’s going to go to school here you don’t want her having the same problems as every other kid in Govanhill where they can’t speak proper English when they go to school”. At first, I was really, really taken aback by it and later into the conversation I just thanked her very politely for all of her advice and then told her very politely that I wouldn’t be taking it and I thought she was absolutely wrong and that perhaps she should seek to read some academic literature before giving people such advice in the future.

Sadie:                         This story isn’t that unusual. Lots of people, often people who mean well, assume that growing up with more than one language at the same time can be confusing for a baby and that, therefore, kids who live in the majority English speaking UK, should hear only English for the first few years of their life. But the research on baby language acquisition produces some results that are maybe kind of surprising.

Antonella:                   My name is Antonella Sorace. I’m a professor of developmental linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. My research is about bilingualism over the life span, so what it means to have more than one language at any age. 

Sadie:                         Do babies who grow up with more than one language grow up linguistically confused?

Antonella:                   Well, I think that’s a very widespread misconception about -- particularly about child bilingualism. There are many people who think that having more than one language too soon confuses the child and the child ends up not speaking any language properly. And then later on having another language may be a problem at school, particularly when the language of schooling, it might be English for example or a different language.

                                    Now there is no evidence for that in research. Research actually sends a very different message. The message is that even a very young baby can distinguish their two languages and now we know, because we have the instruments to study very young children, long before they start saying anything. And so, we know when they can tell the difference between the two languages. This idea of early confusion is really not very well founded at all.

Sadie:                         So how are we able to study the linguistic understanding of babies who can’t talk yet?

Antonella:                   With very, very tiny babies, even newborns, there are special kinds of dummies for example, that are connected to a machine and the dummy can measure the frequency of sucking. You play certain sounds from a language to a child when he’s awake and the child sucks on the dummy and the machine records the amplitude, the frequency, of the sucking. And then playing the same sound, same sound. After a while the child gets bored, like anybody would, and before they fall asleep you change the sound or the language and if the child notices the difference they start sucking more frequently and more vigorously.

                                    That’s one way and there are other ways that can be used with slightly older children. They’re still based on the idea that the child gets used to a language or a set of sounds from that language and you can measure whether they’ve noticed. Then you change the scene or the sounds on them and you can tell whether they pay attention to the change. If they notice the change that means that they distinguish between the two.

Sadie:                          There’s no evidence that raising a child multilingual is confusing or harmful. So why is there such a widespread misconception that it is? Where does this idea come from? Well, there is the fact that when a kid is acquiring more than one language simultaneously it can sometimes take them a little bit longer to start speaking. Not always and not much longer at all but you sometimes hear people talking about it as the bilingual delay. Of course, it can be a worry for parents and carers.

                                    Diana López Lugo and Eva Hanna are two of Antonella’s students and they also carry out research on multilingualism. Here’s Diana:

Diana:                         Since you’re getting to linguistic systems you’re obviously going to -- it’s going to take the child more time to acquire the languages. So that’s obviously a delay but that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to get there. He’s going to catch up. I mean bilingual children tend to be -- tend to have this delay during their early development but it’s just a stage that disappears.  

Eva:                            And it doesn’t happen for every child. I think when -- it’s unfortunate that the word delay is -- has a negative -- but if you think that a child is processing input in two different languages and so they’re just taking more time because they’re taking more input. It’s not a delay in a negative sense and they catch up. 

Sadie:                         People also sometimes notice young kids mixing their languages, switching from one to the other within a single sentence and take this to be a sign of confusion.

Antonella:                         There’s also plenty of evidence that when children mix the two languages, for example, that’s not necessarily a sign of confusion because children mix for a purpose for example. First of all they mix only and mostly when they speak to other bilinguals and not when they speak to monolinguals because they know they’re not going to understood. Second, they mix for a purpose because borrowing, for example, a word from the other language can enrich the message in a way that only another bilingual can understand. Even mixing is really not evidence of confusion. On the contrary, it’s evidence of very good knowledge of both languages.

Sadie:                          Within bilingual communities, adults mix their languages. It’s not a sign of confusion at all, it’s just part of how people speak. My boyfriend John and his friends mix Gaelic and English all the time in conversation because when everyone there understands both languages, why would you limit yourself to just one?

                                    When kids mix their languages, it’s not because they haven’t learned either language properly. They’re using their languages just like adults do. The results of research on early multilingualism are pretty clear but sort of counter-intuitive.       

Eva:                            I think people tend towards simplicity and so they think one language -- if you’ve got one language that works why would you use two? And if you’re not an expert on child development you would probably, intuitively, think that it would be confusing for a child because, actually to be totally honest, sometimes it is confusing to have two languages going on but not in a -- but I think people -- it’s maybe chaotic but not in a bad way, if that makes any sense. I think the -- if you’re not an expert on the topic I think people rely on their intuition and common sense, which isn’t always scientific.

Sadie:                          It’s easy to understand why misconceptions about early childhood multilingualism exist. Even though they’re not supported by empirical evidence.

                                    What about multilingualism for older kids? I did my PhD research with kids who’d moved from Poland to Glasgow and arrived in their new school in Glasgow totally competent in Polish but without much experience of English. Of course in cases like this, it’s important for kids to get help to learn English and for them to learn fast. That pretty much goes without saying. What doesn’t always go without saying is that there are also huge benefits for migrant kids in continuing to use their home languages alongside the new language.

Paweł:                         They don’t realise how much this heritage language can bring to the community, to the individual and the whole country, the whole economy of the country.

Sadie:                         Paweł is a teacher at Polska Szkoła, a Polish language Saturday school in Glasgow.

Paweł:                         What they want to do is to assimilate Polish children, or any children, as quickly as possible, even at the cost of losing their heritage language.

Sadie:                         Polska Szkoła help kids to maintain their Polish while living in Glasgow. They teach subjects like maths, history and geography in Polish to help kids keep up with their studies despite the language barriers they might face in their Monday to Friday classrooms. The kids continue to read and write in Polish, which otherwise they might not do, and they also help kids to keep in touch with their Polish heritage while living in Glasgow.

Paweł:                         If you look at individual -- the person who knows more than one language can find very -- well, can find better jobs and be more useful in this new job. See, for example, a community officer, a health jobs, even carers, in the future you will have in this country many Polish elderly people who maybe will -- more willing to speak to someone in Polish. Even police officer, if the person knows the background and the language can prevent maybe some events rather than fighting the crime. So that’s it. And if you look at the level of the whole country, the economy, there is so many exchange of goods between Poland and UK. Poland is a big producer of food generally, any food, and UK is importer. So this gives opportunity for developing businesses, jobs.

Sadie:                         The kids I worked with in my PhD research were overwhelmingly getting the message stop speaking Polish. They were sometimes told off for speaking Polish in school. Sometimes other kids made fun of them for speaking Polish and often they made the decision to stop speaking Polish themselves: telling me they didn’t like speaking Polish because it’s not useful or because it marked them out as different and foreign. 

Paweł:                         I’ve heard about the cases -- I think it was about eight years ago, cannae remember -- it was a big store where the supervisor didn’t allow, well banned, told them not -- people, not to speak in Polish.

Sadie:                         Is this the staff?

Paweł:                         Yes, the staff. And they spoke -- when they spoke at work and they brought -- as much as I remember -- the case to the court, the tribunal, and that was allowed that they can speak any language they want. So I don’t really see what is the problem. Why you cannot speak in a different language?

Sadie:                         Yeah, that’s one of the things I wonder about is where that comes from. Why would you ever think we must -- I can understand why people would say -- would put pressure on people to learn English quickly. Although I find it annoying, I understand the pressure. But I find it harder to understand why people would say don’t use English and Polish alongside each other.

Paweł:                         It could be a kind of a personal thing maybe. That a person thinks that way that we talk about something I shouldn’t hear. Maybe they talk about me. Maybe they say bad things about me. That’s why the person gets upset.

Sadie:                         Like fear of the unknown?

Paweł:                         Well maybe fear of gossiping behind the back but they don’t realise that probably in most cases it just the easiest and the quickest way to communicate. 

Sadie:                         Now I don’t want to always be the one muttering darkly about power and social control, but…

                                    Anyway, many of the kids I worked with told me that they didn’t speak much Polish anymore and as a result they were starting to lose their Polish.

Paweł:                         Every year we have a case of parents coming to the school with a boy or girl, seven, eight years old, who cannot speak a word in Polish and that’s what the problem. That’s why they came to this school. We phone Grandad on Skype and she or he wants to speak to the boy and he cannae say any word in Polish. And it’s horrible. Cannae communicate and all this bond between family, which in 21st century shouldn’t be difficult to maintain because on technology. Now, it’s still so difficult.

Sadie:                         My friend Agnieszka moved to the UK from Poland five years ago.

Agnieszka:                  I never considered my relationship with my native language and I think it’s only -- when I first moved here, I didn’t notice a change. I think it felt the same speaking Polish and speaking to my family but since then it’s been over five years, I’ve noticed a difference. I was actually speaking to my Grandparents on Skype yesterday and for one I find it difficult to switch sometimes. So if I’ve spent all day speaking English and then I’m speaking to my flatmate and then I go into my room and turn on Skype and I speak to my Grandparents, I notice a bit of a -- there’s a bit of a resistance when it comes to switching. I suppose the way my -- I don’t know if it’s my vocal cords or maybe a part of my brain that is responsible for different languages. There’s a bit of struggle when it comes to switching and then once I do switch, I -- yeah, I do notice myself sounding a bit differently. Which is something that I would have never expected.

I forget words and I also sound different. I don’t think it’s a Scottish accent. I don’t think it sounds like a Scottish person speaking Polish quite well but there is a difference. I used to think it was subtle but then my family pointed it out to me, and I felt so -- I don’t think self-conscious is the right word. I felt okay about it, but it was so strange, and I felt so vulnerable once I heard that they noticed because you never expect your native language to be a source of struggle and then once your own family point it out to you it does feel a bit strange.

                                    I don’t know. Is it a shift in identity? There is something there because once you make that switch and get so used to this new language, or language that used to be new, coming out your mouth, it’s strange then to swap back to something that used to be so familiar. Yeah, sometimes I do feel a bit kind of stuck between the two languages. I used to think of myself as someone who’s good at Polish and English, back when I was a teenager, and recently in the last few years I’ve found myself thinking that I’m neither. I’m kind of bad at both. I’m not quite there when it comes to both. Well I suppose it’s definitely setting high expectations for myself but because I felt myself struggling slightly with both, I just felt like that part of my identity, that being good at languages, was gone. And so was my sense of belonging as well because once your own family notice that you sound different but people in your new home country also notice that you sound different, where do you belong? 

Sadie:                         Losing a language can obviously have heavy personal consequences but research on multilingualism and education suggests that, actually, making space for the home language in a migrant kids’ education can have a positive impact on kid’s abilities in their new language too. Intuitively, you might think that using just English all the time means more exposure to English, which means faster learning, but this isn’t necessarily the case.

Eva:                            All families that support -- that continue -- that continue using the home language it’s been -- study after study has shown that the children do better in school when they continue to use their home language and especially if they receive -- if they’re able to become not only bilingual but biliterate, if they’re learning to read in the home language. That if you support balanced bilingualism that it’s sort of the sum is greater than the parts I guess you get additional benefits.

Sadie:                          Of course having lots of kids who are in the process of learning English presents a real challenge to schools. Again, this goes without saying, but it also presents an opportunity. Migrant kids who are learning English are in the process of becoming multilingual learners and that’s kind of amazing. The arrival of new languages in a school community is potentially a chance for everyone to learn. In my PhD research, I found that not only were the Polish kids I worked with learning the English and Glaswegian of their new community, but the Glaswegian kids were picking up some words and phrases in Polish too. 

                                    Eva and Diana are part of a group which specifically aims to help refugees and asylum seekers negotiate the practicalities of multilingualism in the UK. A big part of the work this group does is helping people to find ways to maintain the home languages.

Eva:                            So if continuing to speak Arabic, or Kurdish, or whatever it is that they speak -- wherever they’ve come from -- if it’s beneficial to their mental health to have that continuity -- to have that link to the homeland that -- that’s been severed. Basically the language is like a link that they can maintain and then in terms of giving them every advantage for their children going into school, that’s what we’re trying to protect. So we’re just trying to protect -- there is so much good will towards refugees in Scotland I’ve found but a lot of it is for English based. Of course learning English is super important for refugee families, for integration and everything, but its integration doesn’t -- having the home language and integration are not mutually exclusive. And that’s so important to teach people. That it’s okay for refugees to keep speaking their own language. It doesn’t take away from them learning English and being integrated linguistically with the local population. Those two things can happen at the same time and in fact it’s better if they do. 

Sadie:                         So asking people not to use Polish or Arabic or Lingala or Farsi probably won’t make anyone’s English better. In fact, helping school kids to maintain their use of these languages might help with their learning of English and their overall educational attainment. The research tells us that using more than one language isn’t problematic in terms of language acquisition or education. In fact, evidence suggests that not only is multilingualism not a curse, but it carries with it a number of potential blessings.

Antonella:                   So we think that knowing more than one language is very good from all kinds of points of view. There are more obvious reasons and less obvious reasons. If we start from the most obvious ones: being bilingual means being bicultural, being more sensitive to other cultures, to other points of view, and that can only be a good thing particularly in today’s society. Among the other non-obvious reasons why bilingualism is good, is for example, the fact that a bilingual child understands other people’s perspectives better. So they understand earlier than a monolingual child that it is possible to look at the same thing from a different perspective or a different point of view and this is again a great advantage. It comes from the fact that they very soon realise that not everybody’s bilingual. So you have to choose the right language depending on who you’re talking to and that is reflected in a wider way into understanding other people’s perspectives better outside language.

                                    There are also advantages that have been found, for example, how we pay attention in an effective way. Now we have to pay attention to what we do no matter what we do, right? But it has been found that bilingual children and then bilingual adults as well can pay attention in a more focused way on what matters for what they are doing and at the same time ignore what doesn’t matter or what is irrelevant or less relevant for what they’re doing. That again comes from the experience of speaking one language and ignoring the others because all the languages of a bilingual are active simultaneously. So I’m speaking English to you but my Italian, which is my native language, and any of the other languages I know, I have to keep them under control. This constant experience of speaking one language and excluding the others is reflected again in a wider way outside language.

Sadie:                         There’s strong evidence that multilingualism has benefits beyond allowing you to speak to more people. This growing body of evidence is really exciting but Antonella’s quick to dispel the myths too.

Antonella:                   Some people now think that “hey, bilingualism can make a child more intelligent” and so there are some commercial attempts to sell you methods to make your child more intelligent, to turn them into geniuses. That is clearly not on because we’re not talking about intelligence, we’re talking about some kind of extra gear that allows a child, and then a bilingual adult, to do better in certain situations but we’re not really talking about intelligence.

Sadie:                         There’s one more surprising and exciting possibility that’s being researched just now but again Antonella’s keen to make sure that people don’t get too carried away.

Antonella:                   Now there is some evidence that being bilingual delays the -- let’s say, both normal cognitive aging, so normal loss of memory or attention abilities and so on, but also certain pathological signs of aging. The first symptoms of certain kinds of dementia have been found to be delayed in bilingual elderly people. Now that doesn’t mean that bilingual people don’t get dementia, and that is very important, but unfortunately that misunderstanding is gaining ground. There’s no connection between being bilingual and having Alzheimer’s or any kind of dementia. What we see is that there is a delay in the appearance of the first symptoms and that is good enough. It’s good enough if it gets -- obviously we need more research in any of these fields but if it gets reinforced by further results it means that – well, there are more and more people living longer and longer and it means that many people may have a longer period of independence and autonomy. Even if they are unlucky enough to get dementia. 

Sadie:                         And by the way, this delay in the appearance of the first symptoms of dementia isn’t limited to people who have grown up with multiple languages. Learning a language later in life could offer protection too. In response to this evidence, the social enterprise Lingo Flamingo recently launched a programme of language classes for older people living in care homes across Scotland. 

Antonella:                   So we’re not saying that bilingualism is magic and it’s a magic cure for everything but we’re saying that it’s a very available experience, probably more available than other experiences. If there are places where they have another language, a minority language for example, they should regard it as a fantastic resource rather than a problem. Multilingual societies should be regarded as an opportunity to develop multilingualism rather than as a set of problems to solve. Of course there are challenges but also many advantages that people underestimate. 

Sadie:                          Not speaking the dominant language in the place you live can obviously present you with practical challenges. We know that, but anyone who’s in the process of learning a new language has a whole range of potential advantages in front of them. Multilingualism is not a curse. Far from it.

In part two, I’ll dig a bit deeper into why a dominant ideology still exists in the UK, which views multilingualism, or certain kinds of multilingualism, with suspicion, contempt or confusion.

Tell me about your experiences with multilingualism @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.  

Massive thanks to everyone who helped me make this episode. Antonella Sorace is the founder of a global research network called Bilingualism Matters. They study bilingualism and language learning and communicate what they know to enable people to make informed decisions based on scientific evidence. Diana and Eva also work with the Edinburgh branch. Paweł is a teacher at Polska Szkoła; a community language school which helps kids to learn and maintain Polish while living in Glasgow. Agnieszka Checka is a writer who writes on a variety of topics but among them her experience of moving to the UK from Poland. You’ll hear more from her in part two.

You can find links to more information about Bilingualism Matters, Polska Szkoła, Agnieszka Checka and Lingo Flamingo in the episode description.

Thanks to John McDiarmid for production support and to Seb Philp for the music. Thanks to Dawn Cody, Ross Christie, Alex Ballantyne, and Gemma Doran for the most recent donations to the podcast. 

Thanks for listening and enjoy part two.