Growing Up with Two Languages

A Practical Guide for Multilingual Families and Those Who Support Them

Una Cunningham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000030679
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Growing Up with Two Languages provides a highly accessible account of the stages of language development, describes and evaluates the various systems and strategies that can be adopted and looks at the problems that can occur when a child is exposed to two languages and cultures.

Combining research-informed advice and the experience of parents raising children as speakers of a wide range of languages in every populated continent in the world, this book and its associated web material will answer questions, offer tried and tested strategies to keep children speaking a minority language, and provide material to enlist the support of the extended family, teachers and others. The perspective of adults who were themselves raised speaking more than one language is included. New to this edition is a chapter focusing on families raising children as speakers of indigenous and threatened languages as well as chapters for teachers and health professionals who want to know more about multilingual child language development and how they can support parents to continue speaking their language with their children. With new and updated first-hand advice, Internet resources and examples throughout, this book also includes a chapter that introduces important recent research into multilingual children and further reading guides for those who want to know more.

This book is for parents who are raising or plan to raise children as speakers of more than one language, and for the teachers and healthcare workers who meet and can support them.

Chapter 1

Families with more than one language

Background

There have always been those who have moved from one country to another, to study or work for a while or to seek a better future for themselves and their children. Europeans are now well used to being able to move fairly freely from one country to another within Europe. In addition, many people have come to new environments as refugees from conflicts, poverty, or other difficulties in other parts of the world. In Japan, Korea and Taiwan, as well as parts of the Middle East, Africa and South America, there are many foreign workers, sometimes married to local people. The USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have been and continue to be settled by large migrant populations, despite already having populations of indigenous people. Many recent migrants to these countries are speakers of languages other than the majority language of English. Legislation in many parts of the world has been tightened up to hinder would-be migrants and asylum-seekers, while travel has become easier and cheaper in the last fifty years, and people are crossing borders all over the world for innumerable reasons.

The reasons behind a move from one country to another where a different language is spoken have a lot to do with how the move will turn out. If a family goes to live in another country for a few years because one or both of the parents have got a job there, the situation is quite different from when a single person moves from one country to another to make a life with a local of the new country, or when a family migrates to settle together in a new country. All of these voluntary migration situations are radically different from those faced by refugee families or unaccompanied young people who flee from a war zone to take refuge in a peaceful country. However, these migrants have some things in common. They are all faced with learning the local majority language and becoming familiar with the culture of their new country. They probably have very different expectations of how well they will succeed at these tasks, though, and how long they are likely to stay in the new country. They are, therefore, not equally motivated to throw themselves wholeheartedly into their new situations.

The terminology used to refer to individuals, families and communities who use more than one language is variable, with bilingualism, multilingualism and plurilingualism being common. Different writers have defined these differently, and the usage has changed through time. A speaker of two languages and a speaker of more than two languages can both be referred to as bilingual or multilingual depending on who is writing. In this book, both bilingual and multilingual are used, usually with no difference in intended meaning. The Council of Europe suggested reserving the term plurilingual to talk about the way an individual uses language and multilingual to talk about the way languages are used by groups of people, but many use multilingual for all of these, and this is the term I prefer to use. This means that both an individual and a city can be referred to as multilingual, even though the city may mostly have monolingual speakers. In Chapters 2 and 3, I will further discuss ways of understanding languages and multilingualism.

Families with more than one language

Some adults who become involved with two languages are in the position of having met and chosen to live with a person who has a different first language from themselves. Two languages generally mean two cultures, although a couple can have separate cultures without speaking different languages. Examples of this are an Argentinian–Spanish couple or a Mozambique–Portuguese couple, or even a couple where one comes from, say, northern Italy and the other from Sicily. Where there are two different languages involved, the challenges are greater. One of the pair may have learned the other’s language at school, or by having spent time in a place where the language is spoken, but if the other has no knowledge of that person’s languages and cultures, it may be difficult to communicate well. Unspoken expectations and assumptions are likely and may lead to misunderstandings, given the couple’s lack of a common background. The subtler the differences between the cultures involved, the less prepared the couple may be for these potential misunderstandings.

Language choice

If you as a couple each have different first languages, whether or not any of these are the majority language of the place where you live, you will need to give more thought to the way you want your languages to be used in your home when you have a child together. A family with more than one language will usually find a regular way of defining which languages are used in which situations, depending on where they live and how well the parents each speak the other’s language. A French–German couple living in Germany may thus speak French between themselves and German in the company of others. If, however, you started out using one or other language together, perhaps because one of you did not then speak the other’s language, you may not feel able to change easily if there comes a time when it would make more sense to speak the other language. When children come along, the parents’ aspirations for the children’s language acquisition will need to be accommodated in the couple’s linguistic arrangements. This is sometimes called family language policy and is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

Example

An American woman and a Swedish man met while they were both studying in Germany. They began by speaking German together. When they subsequently married and moved to Sweden, they gradually started to speak English together. When the woman started learning Swedish, she wanted them to speak Swedish together, which they still do many years later, although it is alternated with English, and sometimes German, depending on the subject matter. When their son was born, they each spoke their own first language with him.

My own story is that when I (from Northern Ireland) met Staffan (from Sweden), we had no choice but to speak English, our only common language. Later, when I moved to Sweden and learned Swedish, we continued to speak English together, even when my knowledge of Swedish became greater than Staffan’s knowledge of English. We each speak our own first language with our four children, even now that they are grown up.

However the multilingual couple decide to organise their linguistic system, one or both of them will at any given time be using a language other than their own first language to communicate. The partner will be left with the task of talking and listening to a person who probably does not have a full mastery of the language being used. The couple will, of course, become very used to this set-up and no longer really hear any foreign accent or faulty grammar that the other may have. Their children, however, may delight in correcting or mocking their parents’ language errors, if they do not find them embarrassing. This is certainly my experience as a second-language speaker of Swedish, with teens who would at times imitate my accent in Swedish as well as my Northern Irish vowels in English and wait for me to catch on. This is apparently not unique!

My mum has a dialect in the Korean language. She is from Busan and has the special accent so I sometimes copy her accent to tease her.

(young woman, raised speaking Korean in New Zealand)

To a certain extent, the less proficient speaker will learn from the first-language speaker, but not many people want to think about the correct form to be used when they are planning what to buy for supper; still less do they want to be corrected by their partner.

Both my husband and I are language teachers – but we have found that it is best not to teach each other. He will sometimes correct me – but I think he takes care not to do it automatically, but to consider the time, place, occasion, and most of all my mood – it can be irritating to be corrected when what is really important is making sure that the garbage gets taken out, for instance.

(English-speaking woman, Japan)

Some do, however!

My husband has always corrected all my mistakes (grammar and pronunciation), making me repeat the same words over and over again until I could pronounce them correctly. This has been very helpful, and it still is.

(French-speaking woman, USA)

When you are living your life through a second language, linguistic correctness cannot be allowed to stand in the way of communication. The learning that does go on will most likely be on the level of absorbing the correct forms used by the first-language speaker. However, if the less proficient speaker is not motivated to improve his or her language, finding it adequate for its purpose, it will probably remain at the same level, give or take a few new items of vocabulary. This is known as fossilisation.

Understanding each other

In some cases, one parent may have no interest in learning the other parent’s language. Before the couple has children, this may never have been a problem – both speak either the majority language or another common language. If a minority language-speaking parent wants to introduce his or her own first language into the home for the first time when speaking to the baby, the other parent may quickly begin to feel left out. This may provide the necessary motivation to learn the language in question, or it may become a source of friction in the family, and might even thwart the whole idea of exposing the child to both parents’ languages.

For parents who want to be able to speak their own language to their child, this can be very frustrating. If the other parent does not support the use of the minority language, it will be challenging to make it an active part of family life. Older children will quickly detect any signs of disapproval from a parent. Some families find that the other parent learns the minority language together with the baby, but the child’s vocabulary will generally accelerate away from the parent’s by the age of 2. This can be avoided if the parent makes an active effort to learn the minority language, preferably well before any children are born.

I’d recommend anyone in an international marriage should do their best to master their spouse’s language or their host country’s language, not only for the sake of their marriage, but also for the children’s sake. We can’t demand from our children anything which we parents cannot accomplish. So our children will be bilingual and bicultural to the extent that we ourselves are.

(English-speaking father, Japan)

Another option, which may, in some cases, be the only way to ensure that the child gets some input in the minority language, is to arrange a system whereby the minority language-speaking parent speaks that language with the child in all situations except when the other parent is present. Of course, this may give the child the idea that there is something wrong with the minority language, or that it is not appropriate in some way.

Depending on the level of mastery that the less proficient partner has in the language spoken by the couple, communication may be more or less affected. First-language speakers may find that they need to use relatively simple language when talking to their partner. There may be misunderstandings even when they both believe the other has understood. A question like ‘Do you know what I mean?’ can be answered in the affirmative by someone who knows what they think you mean, without the misunderstanding ever becoming apparent.

Even using simple language becomes a habit and does not really have to limit the level of conversation. It is possible to talk in simple terms about even the most complex matters if both parties are sufficiently interested. If a couple usually talk to each other in one of their languages, the less proficient speaker will most likely become very fluent in this language, in the sense of being able to speak at normal speed and without hesitation, even if their speech is accented and full of grammatical errors. This facilitates the couple’s communication, making it less arduous for both parties. This is not very different from the kind of practised communication any couple develop after many years together.

Being taken for foreigners

An additional problem in the multilingual family may arise if any of them are in the habit of speaking the minority language in public: the family may be perceived as tourists in their own country. Even minority language speakers are probably quite fluent in the language of the country in which they live.

One problem that I have is that I don’t like to speak English outside the home. When I speak English to my children, people assume that I don’t know Hebrew (even though my children often answer in Hebrew) and they try to speak to me in English. I find this very aggravating, as my Hebrew is excellent and I don’t want to sound or feel like an ‘outsider’.

(mother raising children speaking English and Hebrew, Israel)

If the minority language is reasonably well known as a school language, for example English or German in Sweden, the family risk being addressed in the minority language by well-meaning shop assistants. This puts them in the awkward situation of having to decide whether to answer in the majority language, embarrassing the shop assistants who may feel that they have been eavesdropping, or carrying on the conversation in the minority language without revealing that they are also proficient in the majority language. This is also an issue for minority language-speaking families where both parents are migrants. Even after many years of living in their new country, the family may be taken for tourists or newcomers when they speak the minority language in earshot of others. In some contexts, speaking a language other than the majority language may attract disapproving looks or comments, or even aggression. Some individuals may feel threatened by the public use of a language they do not understand, and this can lead speakers of minority languages to avoid calling attention to themselves in this way.

Transnational families

Globalisation and internationalisation have led to great increases in mobility. While some groups, such as Chinese, Irish, or Jewish extended families have long tended be spread across several continents, they have been joined by many others. Digital technology has made it possible for transnational families to keep in touch, despite being physically separated, and to maintain responsibilities in the place of origin, despite being removed from it. This means that migrants are no longer excused from their family duties, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Families with more than one language
• 2 Expecting a child in a multilingual home
• 3 The child with two or more languages
• 4 Family language policy
• 5 Practical parenting in a multilingual home
• 6 Problems you may encounter
• 7 Raising a child to speak an endangered or indigenous language
• 8 Teachers and educational contexts
• 9 Healthcare and other professionals
• 10 Research and further reading
• Concluding words
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index