Language & culture
Living with two languages by Brita Green
How common is it to be living daily with more than one language? Estimates vary, but as much as between a third and almost half of the world’s population is said to be bilingual. And what exactly does ‘bilingual’ mean? Again, definitions vary, but usually it refers to people who speak two (or more) languages fluently nd use them regularly. and When my husband and I had children, it was obvious to us that we should bring them up bilingually. As we lived in England, we knew that they would learn English. After having spent a few years in Sweden, my English husband spoke Swedish fluently, and we usually spoke it together, so Swedish naturally became the family language. English was of course spoken in other people’s presence, when out shopping, etc. Sometimes we would slip up, and I remember our daughter, aged four or five, on one occasion suddenly exclaiming, ‘Why are we speaking English? There’s nobody here!’ But, inevitably, the time came when the children wanted to be like everybody else and were embarrassed if I would forget myself and say a few words in Swedish in public. ‘Not here!!’, I remember our ten-year-old son crossly hissing at me once on the bus. So, we had a few years of strictly speaking Swedish in Sweden (summer holidays) and English in England — changing over on
the ferry (happy days...) half-way across the North Sea. Much to my surprise, both agreed to take Swedish A-levels, and now, decades later, they happily speak and read — and sometimes even write emails — in Swedish. Fifty years ago, many people worried about bringing their children up with more than one language, and there was talk of the dangers of ‘semilingualism’, a risk of not learning either language properly. Research then appeared that seemed to show that, on the contrary, there were great benefits: ‘Children who speak more than one language are multiply advantaged over their monolingual playmates — in communication, cognition and social interaction.’ (Cambridge University’s Department of Linguistics, quoted by Eva Robards in a short survey of research she compiled for this magazine ten years ago, issue 2012/2.) More recently, it has been found that those research results were unfortunately not clear-cut. Looking at over 150 studies from 27 countries, in 2020, Minna Lehtonen found that no type of bilingualism unequivocally gave cognitive advantages. But she also stressed that no disadvantages
18
