What does it mean to be bilingual?
Dora Johnson
Is everybody who knows two languages bilingual?
Can you be bilingual for life?
If you speak just one language, you probably think that you’re pretty normal, and that people who speak more than one are an exception, or at least a minority. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Th ree-quarters of the people in the world, including many in the U.S. and Britain, are bilingual or multilingual. It’s monolinguals who are a minority breed.
Bilingualism, of course, can mean diff erent things. And not all bilinguals speak two languages at the same level. For example, aft er September 11, 2001, bilinguals responded to U.S. government calls for people who could handle both English and Arabic. But some had skills that weren’t good enough to meet the need. Some spoke both languages fl uently but couldn’t read and write one of them
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well; others turned out to have full skills in one language but limited ability to translate to or from the other.
So how do you get to be bilingual? Oft en it happens early in life, in a home where two languages are spoken. Parents sometimes speak both languages to the child; sometimes one parent uses one language and another uses the other. Th ere also exists what linguists call ‘additive’ bilingualism, where you add a new language to your repertoire later in life. You can obviously do that by learning a lan-guage in school. Or maybe your parents move to Armenia when you’re little and you learn Armenian while continuing to develop English skills at home.
A bilingual capability may also wither away, for example if you move to a new country and the language of the majority largely replaces your original language. We call this ‘subtractive’ bilingual-ism, and we see it oft en in immigrant families. For example, you may overhear a parent speaking to a child in the ‘old country’
language, with the child responding in English. Th e child is sub-tracting her fi rst language from her repertoire. Th is begins quite early. By about age two and a half a bilingual child starts to make choices in language use, and it’s usually in favor of the major-ity language. Th ink of little Quang who moved to the U.S. from Vietnam. He runs errands for his grandmother when she speaks to him in Vietnamese, and may even answer her in Vietnamese, but not in the presence of his friends! He’s decided that English is the language he’s going to use most, and his skill in Vietnamese starts to fade. It can be revived, and he’ll re-learn it more quickly than someone who starts learning Vietnamese from scratch, but it’ll take some serious eff ort on his part.
Parents oft en worry that their child will become confused if exposed to diff erent languages. Th ey needn’t be concerned. Th ere are moments when a child’s language development can cause some anxiety for parents and other adults in their lives, but the advan-tages of using two languages in the home rather than only one far
outweigh any disadvantages. Children are amazing in their ability to code-switch, that is, transfer back and forth between two systems.
Th ey will sometimes mix them up, but they quickly learn to use each language appropriately.
Immigrant families who want their children to retain their community’s heritage language, as well as English, have to con-sciously work at it. Children rarely have the chance to continue learning their heritage language at school, especially if it’s not French or Spanish but a less commonly taught language like, let’s say, Swedish or Tagalog. So some communities start special language programs aft er school or on Saturdays to help keep the language alive. Being bilingual as a child doesn’t automatically mean being bilingual for life.
Bilingualism is not the same thing as bilingual education, an approach to educating children who speak a language other than English. Th e thrust of bilingual education is to help such students learn school subjects through their native tongue at the same time as they’re learning English. For a variety of reasons such programs have been very controversial.
In recent years, dual language education has become popular, and seems to show promise. Dual language programs off er monolingual kids the chance to speak and do schoolwork in two languages (one of which is always the majority language), and thus to develop additive bilingualism. Both language-minority and language-majority kids can become bilingual in classrooms where they learn together and help each other.
Th ere are, of course, important reasons for new citizens of English-speaking countries, both adults and children, to learn English. But there are also important reasons for them to keep, nurture, and strengthen a language they learned at their mother’s knee. In the U.S. and perhaps in other countries as well, new citizens have sometimes been so strongly encouraged to assimilate that they’ve been discouraged from retaining their original language.
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Th at’s a national loss, whenever and wherever it happens. True bilinguals—and by this I mean people whose skills in both lan-guages are very strong—have an enormous advantage in society.
Th ey can function in more than one culture. Th ey can be bridges for communication in their communities and the globalized world.
We need to fi nd ways to produce more of them.
About the author
Dora Johnson is an associate at the private non-profi t Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. Her work at CAL has centered around the teaching and learning of less commonly taught languages. At present she is working on a project to develop a network of Arabic K-12 language teachers in the U.S.
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Opportunities and requirements for professional use of language abilities are discussed in chapters 36 (America’s language crisis), 42 (language-related careers), 43 (dictionaries), 44 (interpreting and translating), 46 (forensic linguistics), 53 (Russian), and 55 (Arabic).
Elsewhere:
Cunningham-Andersson, Una, and Staff an Andersson. Growing Up With Two Languages: A Practical Guide (Routledge, 1999). Th e authors of this manual for parents and professionals draw on the experiences of some fi ft y families from around the world. Th ey provide practical advice on what to expect and how to plan, beginning before the birth of a child!
Baker, Colin. A Parents’ and Teachers’ Guide to Bilingualism (Multi-lingual Matters, second edition 2000). Poses and answers the most frequently asked questions about raising bilingual children.
Caldas, Stephen J. Raising Bilingual-Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures (Multilingual Matters, 2006). Th e author follows the bilin-gual and biliterate development of his own three children through
adolescence. He sees this eff ort as a series of relationships that include family, school, the community, and peer groups. Lessons learned are a key component of this publication.
Center for Applied Linguistics Digest. Raising Bilingual Children:
Common Parental Concerns and Current Research (Center for Applied Linguistics, 2006). Th is two-page digest is designed to address the many incorrect impressions parents, educators, pediatricians, and therapists have about raising bilingual children.
Web site:
http://www.bilingualfamilynewsletter.com
Th e Bilingual Family Newsletter. Th is quarterly periodical has short in-formative articles written in clear language. In addition to summarizing the latest research and information on language learning, bilingualism, biculturalism, etc., it presents real-life accounts of how families have developed solutions to the problems they encounter in raising bilingual children.