Benefits of Bilingualism

The Benefits of Bilingualism

Adapted from The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism by Tobias Jones

Everyone knows that it is both moving and melancholic to watch your children change over the years. But to hear them alter their language over the course of a few weeks and months is almost surreal. It is as if the precious beings you thought you knew are completely different, and the experience is both intriguing and unsettling.

Our children were 12, 10 and seven when we moved from Somerset to their mother's country, Italy, last summer. Until then, they had always lived in England, and their English was what you would expect — the odd spelling mistake, but otherwise fluent and full of pre-teen playground slang.

Now, in Parma, barely a day goes by when they do not inadvertently say something odd: "Mum, I'm eshing [going out]"; "Can we eat pesh? [fish]"; "I've scritten [written] to Grandpa"; "Can you accorten [shorten] my trousers?" Every time it happens we laugh about our private pidgin, called Engaliano or Italish. But behind the laughter is mild astonishment at the speed at which children can overlay and overlap languages in an intelligible way.

What is breathtaking is not just their language acquisition — it is the way their personalities subtly mutate and shift. Benedetta, a bruiser at the best of times, is strangely sweet and gentle in Italian. Emma, the incessant court jester in English, is precise and serious. And Leo, who has always seemed stereotypically Italian, is even more boisterous. It feels as if our children are different, more mature, but also, because of linguistic struggles, somehow more infantile or vulnerable.

Until recent decades, bilingualism was deeply frowned upon and considered deleterious to development. The received wisdom for much of the 20th century was that there was really only space for one language in a child's brain. It was thought that if immigrants maintained a mother tongue at home, it would impede integration at school and probably lead to academic regression and confusion.

However, recently, academics have been suggesting that, far from being a hindrance, exposure to more than one language could offer a distinct advantage. Aptitude tests revealed that bilinguals were marginally more competent at problem-solving, meta-linguistic awareness, and symbol manipulation.

Along with a host of other research, implied in the results is an ability to empathise — to see a situation from another's perspective. It is perhaps obvious that if you are habitually changing your language to accommodate the interlocutor and their context, you are inevitably going to be used to taking into account other people's abilities and points of view. This is called, in the technical jargon, code-switching.

In November last year, there was a remarkable story. A school in London became the first non-independent school to top the league table, and 96 per cent of its students were EALs — speaking English as an additional language. Here was proof of what academic research had been saying for years — that the maintenance of a home language may be beneficial for learning the community language, and that proficiency in a first tongue enables proficiency in the next.

Antonella Sorace, director of Bilingualism Matters at the University of Edinburgh, puts it clearly: for decades there was a notion that learning two languages together would cause problems at school. That was always the message parents received. But there is absolutely no evidence for it. In fact, quite the opposite.

In another language, you do not just learn new words or sounds — you learn new notions. It is like putting on different spectacles and seeing the world with different eyes. You gain a different perspective and sometimes, if you are lucky, you become more rather than less eloquent.

Adapted from The Joys and Benefits of Bilingualism by Tobias Jones