I grew up bilingual — speaking English at home with my British parents and Afrikaans at school. I can actually speak passable Dutch and German as well. I find it interesting, having moved to Britain, that this is seen as unusual since I had many friends at school who were completely fluent in 6 or 7 different languages. After all, in South Africa we have 11 national languages to choose from!
Growing up in the Western Cape, there were a number of interesting effects of the majority of people speaking multiple languages. For a start, if someone seemed to be struggling in one language, the polite thing for the other person to do was just to swap into their native tongue, where possible. Equally, you quickly learnt that there were some concepts that were just more powerfully described in one language over another. As a result, you’d just use the best terms from the best language available — resulting in a hybrid mish-mash of the different languages.
Personally, this is what I think the true value of multilingualism is. It’s about more than just understanding different words for the same concept — it’s about understanding the different concepts that exist, that possibly cannot even be articulated in your home language. This social bilingualism gives you a base-level understanding of the differences between cultures and an appreciation for the value diversity can bring.
Comments (5) Permalink
March 3rd, 2007 at 11:53 AM
People – including me! – are always talking about how kids should learn more about this or that: more languages, more about computers, more mathematics, more science, more history, more critical thinking, more about citizenship and so on. But is this really possible? Unless teaching increases in efficiency, we can only teach people more about one thing by teaching them less about something else. So what should we be teaching less?
March 3rd, 2007 at 3:13 PM
I’m not sure that there’s always a trade-off. I learnt to speak Afrikaans when I was at playschool — at that age it is really easy to pick up the other languages spoken around you. That then meant that later on in school, once we’d continued to study multiple languages, I even took subjects in a different language than my mother tongue. For instance, the first time I was taught Computer Science in English was when I moved to the UK.
Now granted, this is more difficult in England, but I am sure that there are a number of communities where kids could be taught the second most used language (be it Chinese or Punjabi or whatever) at a young age and continue to get the benefits of that broadened understanding for the rest of their lives.
March 15th, 2007 at 12:24 PM
I think the talk about bringing in language learning at a younger age is a positive move. I was lucky enough to go to a primary school which taught french from seven and latin from about 9-10 years old (you can question the point of the latin, but i think it did help me with learning other european languages).
the result of this was that I always found french and german pretty easy up to gcse. then, regrettably, I didn’t take either any further.
i now have pretty good reading comprehension of both, but my spoken languages isn’t much good.
now making an attempt to learn some spanish before our honeymoon in barcelona in september.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:47 PM
This is not totally relevent, but I was hoping someone may be able to help.
I am currently doing a study on the impact that bilingualism has on foreign language learning.
Does anyone have any opinions on this, in terms of do you think that children who have been brought up as simultaneous bilinguals would find it easier than monolinguals to learn additional languages?
Thankyou
March 30th, 2007 at 11:33 AM
Hi Amy,
Personally I have definitely found that I tend to pick up new languages faster than my monolingual friends and colleagues.
Not sure I can speak to WHY tho! 😉
Thanks
Meri