My family ended up trilingual instead
of bilingual, as we parents had taken it for granted, not because we
one day decided that it would be fun (or “beneficial”)
to add a third language to our home, but because this thing about
agreeing on family language policies has more to it than just adult
know-how.
When
the children came along, our home was built around our two languages,
Portuguese and Swedish. Each of them was a foreign language to the
speaker of the other, but both nevertheless carried within them home
flavours that our former common language, English, never did. We went
on building our home in the same way for a number of years,
rejoicing, not least, in the added goodie that hearing our new
languages spoken to our children turned out to be a very effective
(and inexpensive) way of learning them ourselves. But home, of
course, is only one part of a child’s world.
Our children attended preschool in
both Swedish and German, although it was English that became their
real language of schooling. It did so in the best possible way. Their
first experience of an English-medium school was in Hong Kong. As it
happened, the principal had in place what he called a “buddy
programme”, something that we parents had never heard of before, to
cater for children whose command of English was for some reason below
par. Each new child became the ward of a veteran monolingual
English-speaking child in the same class. It was the veteran child’s
responsibility to make sure that the new child integrated, from
knowing where the toilets were located and how to use them (Asian
toilets included), through making new friends, to sorting out
difficulties with class assignments. It was the new child’s
responsibility to show active goodwill in integrating. There were no
rewards for any of the children. They took their teamwork as
part and parcel of school activities, on the awareness that if
someone in some class is struggling, then the whole class is
struggling.
It worked very well. One of our
children had a hearing disorder which up to then had stymied
integration in other schools, including monolingual schools in the
children’s home languages, and this was the first time that not
hearing well didn’t mean not feeling well in school. What I learned
from this was that school well-being, and therefore learning, is best
taken care of through assigning responsibility to the children
themselves.
It worked so well, in fact, that
English, the “foreign” language that we parents had once banished
from our home, found its way back in through the backdoor,
the children’s door. We came to realise two things: first, that we
parents needed to use English to assist with homework, because
homework comes in tongues; and second, that English was turning from
our children’s school language into their sibling language –
which it still is, by the way, now that the children are no longer
children. And no, neither of these novelties lost their novelty in
any smooth way. The children found it funny, to put it mildly, to
hear us parents use their
language to them; and we parents found it even funnier, ditto, to
watch our own flesh and blood build a cubbyhole of their own around
Foreign-Speak. You can read all about the negotiation of our
respective toils and tribulations in Chapter 10, ‘Language input
and language management in a multilingual environment’, of my book
Three is a Crowd?
The
title of this post, in short, reflects what multilingualism is all about:
each of the languages of a multilingual serves a dedicated niche. It
also reflects the dynamics of language use. Whether we use one
language or more, our children cannot become replicas of ourselves,
including in the niche that we assign to each of our languages,
because cloning fits sheep better than human beings. Like everything
that matters to us, languages matter more or matter less to different
people, or matter in different ways along our lives. The next post
has more to say about this.
© MCF 2012
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