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Home
and Family
Bilingualism
by A. Ross, M.A. in Speech
There are people who advise parents against raising their children bilingually. They argue that the child may become confused or that his intelligence or reasoning may be affected in some way, or his speech impaired by stammering, and above all, they warn that the child may end up not speaking any language properly. They believe that this last possibility can easily be proven by pointing at `irregularities' present in the bilingual child's (or adult's) speech.
It is true that when we listen to bilinguals talking to each other, we can notice certain features which are absent from monolingual speech. Features such as a foreign accent, the incorporation of words or expressions from another language, and sudden switches from one language to another, which may occur within the same utterance.
Children tend to mix more if they are frequently exposed to mixed speech. In fact, unless parents are very firm in the matter, children will begin to use the majority language of the country in which they live. The writer has interviewed more than 400 families. Of these, only three managed to raise their children as truly bilingual! True bilingualism is very rare. It means that a person can think, reason and use numeracy skills [count] equally well in two languages.
Many families start off with a determination to raise their children to speak two or maybe three languages. They may succeed with the first child, and partially succeed with the second. But as soon as the oldest child begins school or nursery, he will be exposed to the language of the country. That is the time when the parents have to be really firm if they want to keep the language spoken in the home, pure. However, many parents claim that there are so many other things to be firm about that speech is not one of their priorities.
Furthermore, one of the children may be a late speaker. Many parents run to various authorities for advice, and when the experts advise them to speak only the language of the country in their own home, they are only too anxious to comply.
The child may begin to stammer. Stuttering is extremely common at a young age. But it is so easy to use the `stress of an extra language' as a cause for the stammer. Once again, the parents will revert to one language.
When an older child needs help with his homework, it is advisable to use the language spoken at school, even if parents normally insist on a minority language spoken in the home. Minority language, of course, refers to any language which is not the language spoken in the street. There are several countries which seem to be multilingual, but nevertheless, there is one dominant language in each country.
All children can learn several languages spontaneously, but a very young child who is still in the process of language acquisition, will have more instances of interference than older children or adults. However, a child with learning difficulties (I do not refer to a child who obviously understands but has not yet started speaking) should not be exposed to more than one language. If the child is going to learn a maximum of 100 words, it is rather senseless to teach him two words for `table' because he will end up only having a vocabulary of fifty words.
There are several types of inteference. First is the sounds of the speech. This is more frequently noticed than any other interference. There is a `foreign accent' and a difference in intonation. Adult Hungarians, for example, are easily identifiable by the use of their native rising intonation pattern at the end of sentences. Israelis speaking English may fail to distinguish between long and short vowels, e.g. hit and heat. Similarly, Germans speaking English may fail to distinguish between final consonants such as cub and cup or kid and kit. Adult bilinguals are more likely than children to show features of stress, rhythm, intonation and speech sounds from their first language impinging on their second. In children, interference in intonation can often be observed.
Then there is interference at the grammatical level. Transfer of word order patterns from one language to another. Verb endings transferred to another language: "He's margizing me," an Israeli child may say of a sibling who is annoying him. He was using a Hebrew word with an English suffix.
Interference in the lexical level is the most common amongst children. Nouns are the most frequently switched from one language to another and idioms are frequently translated literally from one language to another. Older children are more aware of the two separate systems and keep to the one language when they address a monolingual speaker. Most of a bilingual's utterances to a monolingual speaker are in the language of that speaker, and incidences of language mixing may be remarkably low, but as soon as bilinguals speak to each other, they mix and switch to a great degree.
With reference to bilingual adults, unless they are the extremely rare true bilinguals, we speak of language dominance. With young children whose language is still developing, we speak of language preference. Some parents report that their children do not address them in the usual language when they pick them up from school. Or when a monolingual speaker is present. Children may also decide to select a particular language in order to retell a story or to quote someone else. Once children are of school age, their language selection will be strongly affected by their environment.
As mentioned in an article about Glen Doman's child who had mastered nine languages, a young child is definitely a specialist in learning to speak. Is a language like cycling or swimming, that once mastered cannot be forgotten even though it is never used? And what is mastery of a language? The ability to communicate or the ability to understand the language? There have been hundreds of studies into language acquisition, but many are anecdotal, which means that one person, or even several people, tell about it but the studies have not been verified. Research into a child's acquisition of language will be discussed in another article.
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