Multilingual ‘deficiencies’ or assessment deficiencies?

The Roman poet Juvenal is credited with asking Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, sometimes translated as ‘Who guards the guardians?’ The question doesn’t boil down to simple word play: guardians do need their own guards, as much as teachers need teachers, or doctors doctors. Assessments need assessments, too. Unfortunately, where assessment of linguistic communicative abilities is concerned, particularly among multilingual children, the consensus about X needing X appears to break down.

Communication takes place through the use of a shared code (e.g. a language), by means of code-bound rules that enable coding and decoding of messages between a sender and a receiver, respectively. It follows that if the code is not shared, there will be either no communication or deficient communication, which would seem to be a pretty basic inference to draw. Assessment tool designers, however, apparently believe instead that any code that happens to be familiar to them is, or should be, shared by any potential test-takers.

The rationale behind communicative ability tests in common use in schools and speech-language clinics hinges on two assumptions: first, that languages amount to sets of well-defined, discrete items and rules such as sounds, words, or word order which, being quantifiable, will provide a straightforward and statistically reliable measure of the test-taker’s ‘command’ over them; and second, that languages are clear-cut entities enjoying a stable, homogeneous life of their own which is independent from the uses that their users make of them. These two assumptions make it clear that language proficiency tests assess linguistic mechanics, not linguistic use, and explain the belief that any language is, or should be, shared by all of its users, in the same way.

Communicative assessment tools test single languages, those that are normed to represent the official (or national, or mainstream, or ‘standard’, or ‘good’) variety of the language in use in the official institutions where assessment happens to take place. Being designed to evaluate ideal monolingual uses of language, they naturally fail to account for real-life multilingual communication abilities. It is therefore small wonder that multilingual children’s test scores remain under (monolingual) par, resulting in suspected or confirmed diagnoses of communicative ‘deficiency’, first in school and then in clinic, to where schoolchildren are referred and where the same traditional assessment instruments are used. The deficiency lies instead in inappropriate use of assessment tools among multilingual populations – a deficiency that extends to assessment of users of non-‘standard’ monolingual varieties.

Current assessments of communication abilities among multilingual children safeguard a mythical ‘integrity’ of the languages in which assessment necessarily takes place, to the detriment of language users.

Image: EducationMattersMag, via MCERA

In Plato’s Republic, the guardians of Kallipolis should educate their souls in, among other virtues, wisdom, courage, and justice, because it is always better to be just than unjust. The same applies, to my mind, to those who should assess assessment tools, to ensure that they represent a fair assessment of what they purport to assess. This is no word play either. I take the lack of scrutiny in academic and clinical assessment matters to constitute a violation of human rights, and I contributed an article on this topic to the special edition of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Assessment of communication abilities in multilingual children: Language rights or human rights? As I say in the conclusion to the article, “Ensuring that children can exercise their right to communicate […] remains with those who can speak for them”.

© MCF 2018

Madalena Cruz-Ferreira (2018). Assessment of communication abilities in multilingual children: Language rights or human rights? International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 20 (1), 166-169. DOI: 10.1080/17549507.2018.1392607

Multilinguals and creativity

Multilingualism is generally assumed to entail creativity. This raises the very interesting issue of whether becoming multilingual makes us become creative, and suggests the even more interesting conclusion that most of the world’s population, being multilingual, must also be creative.

At the same time, since I find it quite difficult to discern the effects of so much global creativity on the continued design and implementation of, say, our global economic, political or educational systems, a closer inspection of what we actually know (as opposed to believe) about this might be in order. A sample of studies from the past decade shows mixed (un)certainty about correlating multilingualism with creativity, let alone asserting that multilingualism causes (or enhances, favours, develops, etc.) creativity, as follows.

Olusola O. Adesope and colleagues assessed findings from previous research in A systematic review and meta-analysis of the cognitive correlates of bilingualism, and concluded for positive correlations between multilingualism and increased cognitive outcomes on, for example, memory, attention and abstract skills. Bernhard Hommel and colleagues, in Bilingualism and creativity: Benefits in convergent thinking come with losses in divergent thinking, compared the creative performance of low-proficient and high-proficient bilinguals, finding that “bilingualism should not be related to ‘creativity’ as a unitary concept but, rather, to the specific processes and mechanisms that underlie creativity”. Hangeun Lee and Kyung Hee Kim, in Can speaking more languages enhance your creativity? likewise examined the relationship between creativity and “degree of bilingualism”, taken to reflect “multicultural experiences”, to find that “degree of bilingualism and creativity are positively correlated”. Mark Leikin, in The effect of bilingualism on creativity, reported that “both early bilingualism and some form of bilingual education” appear to affect (non)mathematical creativity, concluding that there are “differences between two types of creative ability in the context of bilingual and monolingual development.” Anatoliy Kharkhurin’s study, Bilingual verbal and nonverbal creative behavior, in turn, offered evidence to dampen any blanket statement that multilingualism necessarily implies creativity.

It becomes obvious from the research literature that there simply are too many variables at stake, whether linguistic, cognitive, cultural, educational, and so on, to allow clear-cut isolation of multilingualism as a factor of creativity. These variables, however, aren’t inherent to multilingualism: they have absolutely *nothing* to do with its purported ‘complexity’, and all to do with our choices to study them in relation to multilingualism. As much complexity, of the exact same kinds, would emerge if we ever decided to compare creativity among low-proficient vs. high-proficient monolinguals, for example, or among degrees of monolingualism. 

But we don’t do this. Why we don’t study monolingualism in the same way that we study multilingualism only proves our assumption that monolingualism is ‘simple’. It doesn’t prove that monolingualism is simple. This assumption is ideological, not empirical, as Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu observe in Polite Chinese children revisited: Creativity and the use of codeswitching in the Chinese complementary school classroom: “The ideology of monolingualism prevails throughout society, including within minority ethnic communities who are bilingual and multilingual.” My take is that if we wish to answer apparently straightforward questions about multilingualism and creativity in any useful way, we must first make sure that we understand what exactly we’re asking, and from within which premises.

Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s topic, codeswitching (sometimes also called code-mixing or simply, mixing), lays bare another very relevant take on multilingualism and creativity. This is the double standard in our theoretical stances about multilingualism, on the one hand, which nowadays is unquestionably ‘good’, against our practical management of being multilingual, on the other, which may not be so good after all, as I pointed out here. Li Wei and Chao-Jung Wu’s statement that “There is still widespread fear of bilingual and multilingual practices such as codeswitching” remains as cogent. So why isn’t codeswitching ‘creative’ (and therefore ‘good’), since it is evidence of multilingualism?

The answer may have to do with what we mean by creativity. Does it have to do with how we use things and languages, or with how many things and languages we use? Quality or quantity? Learning to use what we need to use, for example languages, means learning how they work – their rules, in the descriptive, procedural sense of this word. These rules don’t exist in nature, they emerge from everyday behaviour. But learning rules entails learning how to break them, too, and not playing by the rules is as good a definition of being creative as any. ‘Creativity’, however, depends on who’s deciding which rules – or rather whose rules – can and cannot be broken. This is why we award literary and other prizes to certain rule-breakers: we praise them for doing things outside the box. And this is why multilinguals don’t get prizes for breaking rules when they mix languages: we don’t praise those who do things outside the language.

I’ve dealt before with this misconception that multilingualism is best approached by investigating the languages of multilinguals instead of the language users themselves, and I’ll return to it very soon. Meanwhile, still on the topic of creativity, I’ll have to qualify what I say in my second paragraph, above. The next post, a guest post, offers evidence that rethinking approaches to teaching, and implementing novel methodologies, have more than welcome effects on how we engage with our new languages.

© MCF 2016

Next post: =Guest post= Teaching languages through drama/theatre positively impacts oral fluency, by Angelica Galante and Ron I. Thomson. Saturday 28^th May 2016.

Multilingualism is about multilinguals

Multilinguals are quite ordinary people. Not only do they outnumber monolinguals, worldwide, they’ve also been around for quite a while and they’re all over the place. Why is it, then, that specialist and lay outlooks alike continue to associate multilingualism with loaded words such as ‘challenge’, ‘complexity’, ‘(super)diversity’, ‘cost’, ‘benefit’, and to collocate the word with vocabulary evoking deviation, like ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’?

I can think of one reason: we’ve somehow lost track of the meaning of the word multilingualism to designate the status of being multilingual, as in the title of this blog, although there is no multilingualism without multilinguals. The result has been that multilingualism, like other -isms before it, acquired a life of its own, whereby we feel free to talk about it without needing to refer to the people that it supposedly describes. Simply using the word, for example, is nowadays a must, in ways that sometimes remind of the reverential tributes we feel we ought to pay to things that we do not really understand, -isms included. The abstract of Hervé Adami and Virginie André’s recent book, De l’idéologie monolingue à la doxa plurilingue: regards pluridisciplinaires, precisely captures the current awed stance about multilingualism, of which this excerpt is worth quoting in full:

“Le vent ayant tourné en faveur de la “pluralité”, sous toutes ses formes, le plurilinguisme est devenu une notion à la mode puisqu’il s’inscrit dans le sacro-saint “respect de la diversité” qui constitue le socle idéologique de la bien-pensance d’aujourd’hui. Dans cette communion collective autour des bienfaits et des avantages du plurilinguisme, on a oublié qu’il devait constituer un objet d’étude plutôt qu’un objet de culte.”

Cult objects tend to develop (evil? benevolent? mysterious?) strangleholds on us common mortals, making us do things and be things that we’re powerless to control. Multilingualism does or doesn’t do this and that to us, ought to be something but mustn’t be the other, we should and should not, can and cannot do so much or so little about it – is this what being multilingual is all about? Do we really want to go on stockpiling opinions about multilingualism until this -ism fad inevitably burns itself out and the next one enters the stage?

Or do we want to start dealing with multilingualism for what it factually is, the natural linguistic state of over half of humankind, across time and space? This means start dealing with people, not words, because multilingualism is about multilinguals. It means start looking at what multilinguals do, how they do it and why, to find out what’s going on, not what we’ve been told must be going on. It means focusing away from two myths which have compounded the purported intractability of multilingualism.

First, the myth that monolingualism is an unquestionable norm of linguistic behaviour, as Liz Ellis was among the first to question in a collection titled Monolingualism. Monolinguals use their single language for all purposes, with all people, at all times. This is not what multilinguals do, whether with all their languages or just one of them. The only similarity between multilinguals and monolinguals is that all of us go about our daily business making use of our full linguistic repertoires.

Second, the myth that observing the languages of multilinguals means observing multilingualism. What we call ‘languages’ exist only in our collective imagination. What we call ‘features of languages’ exist only in linguistic theories – all of which are monolingual-based, by the way. In a collection of essays edited by Anwar S. Dil and titled The Ecology of Language, Einar Haugen reminded us that “[t]he concept of a language as a rigid, monolithic structure is false, even if it has proved to be a useful fiction in the development of linguistics” and that “[a language] has no life of its own apart from those who use it”.

Languages are tools that we create, develop and mould to serve us. They’re not straitjackets to which users must accommodate, a misconception which isn’t exclusive to research on multilingualism but which continues to shape this research. Languages aren’t there to be reproduced and respected as-is, because language users aren’t language curators.

Language users interact with their environment, their linguistic environment included. They are the real-life people that we parents, teachers, clinicians, encounter in our everyday lives, whose real-life language needs we feed, and whose real-life language uses feed back into our own. Language users are, in short, what we need to address. I’ll do that in the next couple of posts, dealing with home, school and clinical environments.

Ellis, E. (2008). Defining and investigating monolingualism. Sociolinguistic Studies, 2 (3). DOI: 10.1558/sols.v2i3.311

Haugen, E. (1972). The ecology of language. In Dil, A.S. (ed.). The ecology of language. Essays by Einar Haugen. Stanford: Stanford University Press (pp. 325-339).

© MCF 2015

Next post: Being multilingual at home. Saturday 9^th January 2016.

What does ‘multilingual’ mean?

What, exactly, do we mean by the label ‘multilingual’? I don’t mean dictionary-sanctioned definitions of the word, nor what the word should mean according to more or less entitled opinions, I mean what linguists mean when we talk about word meanings: what does the observation of uses of the word ‘multilingual’ tell us about its meaning? In order to find out, we can do what linguists do, which is to collate a sample of contexts where we find the words that interest us.

We observe, first, that ‘multilingual’ appears in contexts such as “... bilingual and/or multilingual ...”, implying a core distinction between two and more than two languages. The dichotomy, however, seems exclusive to bi- vs. multi-, in that we don’t find contexts such as “trilingual and/or multilingual”, “quadrilingual and/or multilingual”, and so on. The reason might well be that two languages were long thought to be the crowning achievement of human linguistic ability. Evidence of this belief lingers on in our current terminology, where we still talk about SLA (Second Language Acquisition) to refer to any number of languages learned beyond our native ones, or about L1 to refer to a (single) language learned from birth, the assumption here being that there must be some L2 politely waiting in line to become part of one’s linguistic repertoire. Habitual use of cardinal/ordinal 2-related words in these contexts, lacking relationship to the meaning of ‘2’, explains why the word bilingual has come to mean ‘more than one language’ or ‘two or more languages’. Which is rather confusing, to say the least: just imagine using words like bifocal or bilateral to refer to ‘two or more’ focal lengths or sides, respectively. This is why I prefer multi-words to refer to ‘more than one’.

We observe, second, that the word ‘multilingual’ collocates with family, school, clinic, on the one hand, and with child, teacher, clinician, on the other. This sample shows that the word is used as a qualifier (we could call it an adjective) of another word (a noun). The same goes for contexts like The family/child/ ... is multilingual. More uncommon are collocations such as A multilingual is ..., multilinguals are ..., or a/the multilingual., where a final stop follows the word: I am / They are multilingual is sanctioned by use, but I am a multilingual / They are multilinguals apparently isn’t. Not all that long ago I had to add the plural form multilinguals to the dictionary in my word processor, which kept marking it with a no-no wavy red line. We’re not comfortable using this word as a noun – yet: it could well be only a matter of time for multilingual/multilinguals to become as noun-worthy as bilingual/bilinguals, given that our attention to non-monolinguals dates from quite recently.

A third observation is that when we’re talking about, say, multilingual schools and multilingual teachers, we’re talking about two different multilingualisms – and yes, my word processor also had issues with this plural. A multilingual T, including families, schools, clinics, countries, environments, is a T(hing) where more than one language is used, whereas a multilingual P, including children, parents, teachers, clinicians, individuals, is a P(erson) who uses more than one language. This is not splitting hairs: the verbal form “is used” indicates a passive construction, probably familiar from school textbooks in interesting sentences like The bone is eaten by the dog. In language textbooks, the by-phrase is always there, because the purpose of textbook passives is to teach that they must match an active counterpart, in this case The dog eats the bone. Language students apparently need not be taught that we use passives precisely to be able to ignore the by-phrase, either because we have no idea who is actively doing the action represented by the verb, or because we prefer not to say. Exactly as when we define, say, a multilingual school as a school where more than one language is used. By whom? We don’t know.

What we do know is that families or schools, being institutional abstractions, can’t ‘use’ languages: people can. We also know that when we say that a school or a country ‘has’ more than one language, we’re using metaphor. Schools and countries can’t own anything, except metaphorically: people can. Which means that talking about, say, multilingual environments is not the same as talking about multilinguals: a multilingual environment is one where different languages are involved, but not necessarily multilingual people. Multilingual environments can feature monolinguals, as in multilingual schools or clinics where the students or clients are multilingual whereas the staff are not, and that’s why multilingual signs exist for the benefit of those who use only one of the languages in them.

In Cruz-Ferreira, M., Multilinguals are ...?, Chapter 11

Image © MCF

Failure to realise that multilingualism has to do with *multilinguals* explains the obsession with the languages of a multilingual that has characterised specialist and lay quests into multilingualism. We select multilinguals’ vocabulary sizes, accents, grammar, pragmatic proficiency, for comparison with monolinguals’, to ascertain the presumed state of health, or integrity, or wholeness, of multilinguals’ languages, apparently expecting to find the key to multilingualism in the languages themselves. A bit like saying that the key to Maria João Pires’ performance lies in her pianos. We’ve even started comparing trilinguals to bilinguals, those not-so-exciting-any-more language geniuses of yore, and I’m sure the day will come when we’ll compare octalinguals to heptalinguals, to find out... What, exactly? I wonder, too. This way of looking at multilingualism takes it as a property of languages, which is clearly nonsensical. Languages can’t be multilingual: people can.

If we want to understand what being ‘multilingual’ means, we need to shift our focus from the languages to the language users. Only then can we stop asking useless questions about what different languages do to people and start asking relevant questions about what people do with different languages. Next time, I’ll try to work out what this means.

© MCF 2015

Next post: Multilingualism is about multilinguals. Saturday 31^st October 2015.

Multilingualism and disorders

Norms of conduct, including linguistic norms, are social constructs. They vary in space and time, and they can be of two types. Descriptive norms draw on observation and tell us what people do, for example that interrupting your conversation partners is common in parts of southern Europe (which can be a sign of polite engagement in the exchange), or that fermented herring is a delicacy in parts of northern Europe (which can be a sign of Nordic stoicism). Prescriptive norms draw on judgement and tell us what people should do, for example that we must respect our elders’ conversational turns, or abstain from consuming fermented food in the presence of sensitive noses.

Norms are useful constructs because they help us regulate our behaviour among fellow human beings – although it remains entirely up to us to choose, say, to be a Roman in Rome, or to insist that only Romans should be heard in Rome. Norms are useful also because they underpin comparative analyses which can help us decide what isn’t normal, and act upon that decision. On one condition: that we know what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about norms.

Taking descriptive norms to apply to populations beyond those which supplied the norming standard is a telling sign that we have no idea what we’re talking about: for example, assuming that all Europeans enjoy fermented fish meals. Another is confusing descriptive and prescriptive norms: for example, insisting that we should never interrupt people. Unfortunately, both signs are richly documented in our ways of dealing with multilingualism.

Descriptions of linguistic behaviour that apply to monolinguals because they were normed for monolinguals have arbitrarily, though routinely, been generalised to multilingual behaviour. They provide the benchmarks through which we assess multilinguals, on grounds that would make us cringe if our reasoning hadn’t become so dulled by their familiarity.

When we select multilinguals for comparison with (experimental) populations containing no multilinguals, while never giving a thought to performing comparisons the other way around, we’re doing two things. One, we’re saying that monolingualism is a useful and unquestionable linguistic norm from which to draw useful and unquestionable conclusions about non-monolingual behaviour; and two, we’re singling out multilingualism as the reason for the comparison, thereby self-fulfilling the prophecy that multilingualism is a deviation from those norms. What else could we expect to find from these comparisons, really?? Such practices turn multilinguals into the platypuses of lingualism: they’re funny not because they are funny, but because the norms guiding our taxonomies are. Interrupting people and basking in fermented herring are also deviations from some norm.

Respectable academic publications have indeed taught us that multilingualism is deviant. Only in the last two decades, they have featured, say, the linguistic development of multilingual children alongside linguistic development in clinical conditions such as deafness, blindness, autism, prematurity, specific language impairment and genetic disorders, or socioeconomic conditions such as extreme poverty, under headings titled varieties of development, or development in exceptional circumstances. The thinly veiled political correctness of the italicised words in fact sanctions multilingual development as atypically other. My articles ‘First language acquisition and teaching’ and ‘Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children’ give an overview of these matters.

Conclusions sanctioned by authoritative reports such as these expectedly lead parents and educators to take multilingualism as a disorder, best addressed by specialists.

In Cruz-Ferreira, M., Multilinguals are ...?, Chapter 1

Image © Dinusha Uthpala Upasena

Mistaking observed norms for prescriptions, in turn, is the natural consequence of our ignorance that descriptive norms, in the plural, must be established for every normal population. A norm describing us, here and now, cannot apply to them, elsewhere and evermore. The dearth of descriptions of multilingual normality explains that discussions about multilinguals concern not what they do, but what they should do, according to monolingual standards. This is why recommended behaviour for multilinguals invariably targets the elimination of multilingualism itself, in the same way that we’d do well to eradicate other pathogenic agents.

To me, the issue is that laypeople and specialists alike seem to have great difficulty understanding that difference is not synonymous with deviation, and this is why we go on maltreating differences. Add to this the misconception that multilingualism has more to do with languages than with the people who use them, and we have the perfect recipe counting multilingualism as an ingredient of clinical conditions: we remain persuaded that multilingualism is about what languages can do to people, instead of what people can do with languages.

Multilingualism is *not* a disorder. Neither does it cause, avoid, worsen, or repair disorders, because it doesn’t even correlate with disorders of any kind. One of the reasons for the widespread belief that it is and it does relates, no doubt, to our additional difficulty in providing precise definitions for the terms that we use. What, exactly, do we mean by the label ‘multilingual’? I turn to this next.

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2011). First language acquisition and teaching. AILA Review, 24, 78-87. DOI: 10.1075/aila.24.06cru

Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2012). Sociolinguistic and cultural considerations when working with multilingual children. In S. McLeod & B. A. Goldstein (Eds.), Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children (pp. 13-23). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

© MCF 2015

Next post: What does ‘multilingual’ mean? Saturday 3^rd October 2015.

The perfect multilingual

In case you’re wondering, let me reassure you straight away that yes, the title of this post is meant to be sarcastic. Perfect multilinguals do exist, of course, though only in the minds of those of us who mistake ideals of perfection for reality.

Multilingual perfection awardees must satisfy a number of criteria. If you are, or were, a language learner as an adult, forget it: not having acquired all of your languages as a young child automatically makes you a non-multilingual. Either your accent, or your choice of words, your delivery, proficiency, fluency, grammar, conversational skills, in one or more of your languages, or your physical appearance, or all of the above, won’t pass the perfection litmus test, which is a match to native(-like) standards. This is an intriguing criterion, because it assumes that we know what native users are, look like, and do with their languages. I recently came across a very entertaining report in Nature, about the woes of having articles submitted to journals anonymously peer reviewed in order to assess their scholarly quality, where I found this gem: “Another reviewer suggested that the [article] authors should find ‘someone who speaks English as a first language to proofread the paper’, even though all four authors – including two tenured professors – were native English speakers.”

If, on the other hand, you’re a child acquiring your languages from birth, you may stand slightly higher up the qualifying ladder. But only slightly, because even though you might technically qualify as a native multilingual, there have been studies on such children reporting on their foreign accent in one or more of their languages, numbering their languages L1, L2, Ln to suggest sequential language learning, or arguing that one of their languages is dominant across an often unspecified board. As a young child, you are also bound to fail the LSRW condition, stipulating that being multilingual means proficiency in Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing all of your languages. This acronymic criterion does two things: first, it disregards all of us for whom language use involves neither listening nor speaking; and second, it adds the ‘RW’ twist, drawing on the well-attested confusion between languages and their printed counterparts. If I read and write Latin, but don’t speak it, am I multilingual with Latin? If I’m a native user of Singlish, but never wrote anything in it, am I multilingual with Singlish? Fascinating questions, and fascinating criterion, because it means that young multilinguals, as well as multilinguals who are illiterate, or happen to use one or more of the vast majority of the world’s languages which lack printed versions, aren’t perfect multilinguals either.

So who is? The issue is not so much that defining multilinguals looks pretty much like an exercise in shooting at a moving target: every time you think you’ve answered a question, about yourself or others (Am I multilingual? Are you?), you find that the question has changed. The issue is that the perfect multilingual matches the mythical being that I’ve called multi-monolingual and that can be represented like this:

Cover of Cruz-Ferreira, M., Multilinguals are ...?

Image © Dinusha Uthpala Upasena

Perfect multi-monolinguals, in short, have complete, unmixed, and parallel command of all of their languages. If taken seriously, this means, for example, that they must be dominant in all their languages which, if taken seriously, makes one wonder about the seriousness of the paradoxical claim that multilinguals must develop a single dominant language.

Instead of taking seriously claims about multilingualism which make no sense at all, let’s leave the sarcastic mood and take a serious look at what these criteria imply: they say that there are perfect, and therefore imperfect, uses of language, which means that those uses are best judged rather than observed. They say that living up to language standards is what steers our language uses, which means that languages exist independently of their users. And they compound the myth that being multilingual means being lesser lingual. There is one good reason why questions about the perfect (real, proper, true, etc.) monolingual aren’t ever asked: they would just make us laugh. Which monolingual has perfect command of their single language, according to the criteria that should define a perfect multilingual?

Real-life multilinguals are as linguistically perfect as their monolingual counterparts. All of us draw on all of the linguistic resources at our disposal in space and time, whether we label these resources mono- or multi-. And all of us are fair game for judgement and deprecation according to someone else’s and, not least, our own ideals of perfection.

The questions that make sense aren’t about linguistic perfection, they’re about why claims of linguistic perfection go on being made. Asking these questions is important also because the mix of ingredients in funny criteria purporting to define multilingualism carries over to funny methods that we go on using to teach and assess those who are (becoming) multilingual in school. I turn to this next.

Woolston, C. (2015). Scientists offer advice on how best to respond to reviewers. Nature, 522 (7554), 9-9. DOI: 10.1038/522009f

© MCF 2015

Next post: Textbook languages. Saturday 11^th July 2015.

The aliens in our midst

Those of us who were brought up in monolingual homes may feel rather unsettled about how to deal with little multilinguals in the family. This is the case even if we are multilinguals ourselves, because the key words here are bring up and home: it’s one thing to be multilingual, and quite another to nurture multilingual children.

One common reason driving parents to raise their children multilingually relates to the languages used by each parent, and so to the languages that are relevant to each side of the family. Parents are likely to want their children to be able to talk to grandparents, little cousins, and other big and small relatives and friends in those relatives and friends’ own language(s), which may well be a single one, thereby adding the benefit of engaging relatives and friends in the process of making the children theirs, too.

This means nurturing children to feel at home in distinct linguistic and cultural environments. Although there is no fundamental difference between doing this and raising children to become linguistically and culturally appropriate in distinct monolingual environments, as all parents do, many of us remain persuaded that we’re navigating uncharted waters as soon as we start using multi- (or bi-) prefixed words to refer to behaviours and uses of language, on the belief that only such words refer to ‘diversity’. On the related belief that multilingual/bilingual children must therefore remain forever partial strangers to each ‘mono-’ side of a mixed family, well-meaning relatives and friends will scrutinise the children’s linguistic and cultural behaviour for evidence supporting this belief – and will, naturally, find it.

Words that “all other children know” are missing, whereas the words that these children do know are used and pronounced in funny ways. The multilingual nature of the children’s linguistic creativity, language play, child-speak, or plain, typical, nonsensical child gibberish, turns to evidence of fluency in “other” languages, which “our” language conspicuously lacks. Whatever the children do, or do not do, in short, fails to match standard behaviour associated with the monolinguals in the family. And, of course, any perceived deviation in the children’s ways of expressing themselves is immediately attributed to their ‘multi-’ status: the children’s desired well-being (read: conformity to familiar mono-prefixed standards) is being threatened by their parents’ bizarre (read: multi-) linguistic choices.

The colourful variety of opinions on raising children in any family, pitting mums against dads, parents against grandparents, and so on, finds itself compounded in multilingual families, particularly where the languages and customs of each side are mutually unintelligible. Sharing a grandchild (or cousin, or friend) with ‘foreigners’ and their Foreign-Speak may feel like an intrusion on our territorial rights to people, spawning anything from bewilderment to mild conspiracy theories. In my family, for example, we had Swedish relatives gape in awe at their realisation that our toddlers could inflect Portuguese verbs (see Chapter 7 of my book Three is a Crowd? for more on this): “They must be so gifted for languages, everyone knows how difficult Portuguese inflections are!”, with no mention of the equally ‘difficult’ Swedish inflections that the children were also producing at the same ages. And we had Portuguese relatives frown at me when I failed to react to the children’s addressing, in English, a slice of bolo inglês (which translates properly as ‘fruit cake’, though literally as ‘English cake’) on their plate: “Why don’t you tell them to speak Portuguese in Portugal?”

Both sides of the family winced, in other words, at the suspicion that their own flesh and blood might well belong to alien hordes instead.

Image ©: clipartheaven.com

“Do you really mean to force the poor things to speak so many languages?” or “Shouldn’t you have a doctor check out their gobbledygook?” became standard questions to us parents. They were asked with unmistakable signs of distress, often in the presence of the gobbledygook-speakers themselves, and apparently with no thought of how adult uneasiness might reflect on the children’s behaviour, thus self-fulfilling the expectation of ‘strangeness’.

Concerns such as these appear to me to draw on subtractive conceptions of multilingualism, where different languages compete in a zero-sum game, and where, therefore, more than one language doesn’t mean ‘more than one language’ but ‘many partial languages’. Multilingual children naturally mix both their languages and their cultures, but mixes are taken as evidence of gaps in particular languages, rather than the token of healthy multilingualism that they are.

Parents must of course use some language to rear their children. If we stop to think for a while that multilingualism is as typical as monolingualism, rather than a manifestation of linguistic ‘otherness’, we’re likely to conclude that, really, what could be more natural than using with our children the languages that matter to our respective families? There are no aliens descending on any of us after all: raising multilingual children in traditionally monolingual environments is simply a different way of being different in those environments. Differences of this kind may sometimes feel overwhelming, because so many of us have been persuaded that being multilingual is a headline-deserving novelty. But is it? That’s what I ask next time.

© MCF 2015

Next post: Multilingual novelties. Saturday 16^th May 2015.

Native multilinguals

Some of my language teaching students sometimes express out loud their heartfelt desire to become native speakers. I was quite baffled the first time I heard this: we’re all native speakers, surely, and we can’t become natives, if we take the word “native” to mean what I supposed it is meant to mean, ‘from birth’. But does it? It turned out that my students’ previous teacher training had included the mantra that “native” means ‘flawless’ in this collocation, and flawless, whatever we take this word to mean, is certainly something that all of us can at least aspire to become.

This latter meaning of the word “native” has in fact been made quite explicit in the literature about “second” (or “foreign”) languages – with my profuse apologies for the scare quotes that will crop up all over this post: I’ve no idea what the scared words might mean, in this literature. This meaning explains, for example, why some of us think it a worthwhile endeavour to compare school language learners to “native speakers”, for purposes of language quality assessment. But there is a snag: if learning languages from birth entails flawless use of those languages, how come multilinguals across the board, including simultaneous multilinguals who learn more than one language from Day One, go on being compared to “native speakers”?

The thing is that “native speaker” has yet a third meaning, ‘monolingual’, this time a covert one, which nevertheless heeds the overt, systematic practice of comparing any multilinguals to monolinguals. This meaning explains, for example, the virtual absence of acknowledgement that multilinguals can be “native” users of their languages. If we accept that multilingual proficiency should be assessed through comparison with “native” proficiency, then we’re saying that multilinguals and natives are two distinct kinds of language users, since we can’t compare a thing to itself.

But there is another snag. If multilinguals aren’t native users of their languages, then they must be “non-native”, by the logic of the assumedly useful labels which populate research on language uses. However, they aren’t, because multilinguals get compared to non-natives, too. In addition, simultaneous multilinguals can’t be “non-native”, if their languages are there for them from Day One, which is one of the meanings of “native”. Multilinguals, in sum, appear to inhabit a Linguistic No Man’s Land.

“Day One”, unfortunately, may not be what clinches the issue either. If the language(s) in which we’re brought up from birth happen to be imported languages, then those languages aren’t “ours”. And if we learn a new language in early childhood, though not exactly from Day One, how many days should we count to count as a native user of it? Can I, for example, claim French as native language, having lived with it from just before age 3? Or was I then already way past my native learning prime, as I must have been when I learned my other languages several years later? If you’re interested in the mysteries of “critical periods” which snipe at “native” language learning abilities, Carmen Muñoz and David Singleton’s state of the art discussion, A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment, is a must-read.

Scare-quoted terminological acrobatics about multilingualism would be hilarious, of course, if it didn’t appear in “serious” research, thereby proving that we’ve no idea what we’re talking about. Have a look in my article First language acquisition and teaching, to see what I mean. The muddle got compounded when researchers developed a preference for labelling the languages of a multilingual by means of numbers, possibly on the belief that identifying things by numbers makes them look scientifically unquestionable. There’s always some “L1” lurking in there somewhere, which means that there must be rankings of L2, ... Ln, where the numbers apparently serve the purpose of showing that languages either politely follow one another or should do so.

But what do these numbers mean when, say, simultaneous multilinguals learn one or more new languages in school? Not much, it seems, because we prefer to stick to labels rather than acknowledge their undefinable uselessness. Since “L1” represents an inherently singular concept (in more than one sense of “singular”), the logic of cardinal and ordinal numbering requires that L1 = “first language”, whereby everyone must have a single “first” language, endowed with rights of primogeniture associated with other firstborns. If there’s no single chronological first language, no problem: we just assign one to children, for reasons of administrative expediency, and call it their “mother tongue”. Finally, by the logic that first = “best”, we end up talking about “dominant” and “balanced” languages, and about all the other hopeless labels which do no more than betray our hopeless beliefs that multilinguals are, in fact, funny monolinguals.

This state of affairs may well explain why multilingualism goes on being blamed for anything that deviates from monolingualism, to which I’ll return some other day. Meanwhile, the next post, a guest post, goes back to where this post started, to report vivid encounters with “nativeness” from a language teacher who’s also had plenty of reasons to wonder about the meaning of this word.








Cruz-Ferreira, M. (2011). First language acquisition and teaching. AILA Review, 24, 78-87 DOI: 10.1075/aila.24.06cru

Muñoz, C., & Singleton, D. (2010). A critical review of age-related research on L2 ultimate attainment. Language Teaching, 44 (01), 1-35 DOI: 10.1017/S0261444810000327


© MCF 2014 

Next post: =Guest post= Nativeness: The curse and blessings of genes, geography and cadence, by Ng Wan Qing Jessie. Saturday 15^th November 2014.

Learning languages – what for?

It has somehow become politically incorrect to question the current upswing in the seesaw about multilingualism, to the effect that we should all dedicate ourselves to learning languages.

I personally think it’s great fun to learn languages just because they’re there, probably because I work with them as a linguist, but there’s one other reason why I learned the languages that I use, which is, simply, that I have to use them. I wouldn’t be able to function in my everyday environments with a single language. What I find intriguing is the blank encouragement to learn languages for apparently no other reason than everyone else saying that we should. Do we know why we’re joining the chorus? Or are we just doing our best to prove R. W. Emerson’s point that “Nothing is more rare, in any man, than an act of his own” – to which Oscar Wilde added that “Most people are other people”? It grieves me to find languages ranking among the new desirables, on the strength of decidedly consumerist hype: what matters is how many you have.

Multilinguals have “many” languages for the same reason that a lot of people have more than one of anything, from pairs of shoes to smartphones, not out of endemic acquisitionitis but because they need them for everyday purposes. Saying this, however, is about as interesting as saying that monolinguals have one language for exactly the same reasons: we all acquire whatever number of languages we need to use in our daily business. Are multilinguals and monolinguals all that different, then? And is it worth spending time and resources on spot-the-difference activities? Nothing is easier, in fact, than finding differences: as the saying goes, we’re all unique just like everyone else. What grieves me even more is that the current drive to (apparently) eradicate monolingualism ends up pitting people against people for yet another reason which defies rational comprehension.

Multilingualism is not “modern”, despite the peddling of its conceptualisation as new. It is in fact so old that our historical records contain no special mention of it by name: it’s taken for granted. Using more than one language is, and has always been, natural. What’s new is not the number of languages that we’ve ever had as individuals, what is new is this idea that talking about linguistic arithmetic makes sense.

The idea grew, in all likelihood, out of current preoccupation with “global” languages, as if they were also new, which in turn highlights our apparently sudden realisation that many users of those languages are monolingual – and likely to have no problem remaining so. After all, they do have a good excuse for not bothering to walk all the way to the mountain, if the mountain keeps racing towards them. But this also makes them easy targets of the charge that there’s something wrong with them for being unwilling language learners. Unfairly, I think.

What should we learn languages for? Language courses routinely offer grammar courses instead. The conviction behind this choice is roughly equivalent to believing, say, that swimming courses should offer familiarisation with aquatic dynamics and the physics of flotation. Monolinguals don’t need to become multilingual in order to become acquainted with grammar, if learning grammar is their purpose. But if their purpose is to be able to use other languages because they’ve found a need to do so, then their awareness of that need is encouragement enough to learn those languages – just like multilinguals.

Multilingualism isn’t a purpose in itself, to be worn, as it were, for ornamental purposes, nor is it something to pitch against monolingualism, as Western-minded linguistic ideology has conditioned us to do. “Against”-ideologies are not, I don’t think, the best way of driving home the physical and mental well-being that multilingualism is said to promote among human beings. Such mindsets don’t help us understand multilingualism either, because they go on portraying it as “special”. Being different doesn’t mean being better or worse, and striving to be different from what we are doesn’t mean becoming better or worse. It just means becoming different. Default or “ideal” human linguistic states aren’t found in the number of languages that we have, they’re found in our ability to make sense and make use of the languages that we need, for our purposes.

I’ll have some more to say about language learning purposes next time. Meanwhile, let me leave you with a thought for the day, Shakespeare’s dejection about other kinds of compulsive gatherers:

“What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” 

© MCF 2014

Next post: Learning to use languages. Saturday 5^th April 2014.

Expats and immigrants

Have you ever wondered why those of us who move to work in a different country are sometimes called expats and sometimes immigrants? The labels can’t reflect distinct purposes behind the move, because both groups leave previous stomping grounds to seek (perceived) better conditions elsewhere. So I thought of trying to understand the reason for the choice of different labels.

We could start with standard dictionary definitions. Expat(riate): ‘one who lives outside their native country’. Immigrant: ‘one who comes to live permanently in a foreign country’. I wonder why these definitions can’t be swapped, in that neither expats nor immigrants live in their “native” country – or both are “foreigners” in their new country, if we prefer. The word “permanently” appears to hint at a difference, portraying immigrants as having moved for good, whether intentionally or not. I also wonder. Many immigrants leave their country not because they’ve ruled out returning to it, but because the only way to return to it and survive in it involves spending time elsewhere creating the means to do so. On the other hand, if expats count as temporary visitors, I go on wondering what to make of families like mine (we rank as expats, not immigrants), who’ve stayed put in the same country for decades as permanent residents. How permanent is “permanent”?

We could try integration into the host community. Maybe not a good differentiator, on second thought, in that my thesaurus gives ‘alien’ and ‘outsider’ as head synonyms of “foreigner”. Whether quartered in dedicated compounds or roughing it out there in the mainstream jungle, neither expats nor immigrants are renowned for assimilation skills. Perhaps because we all tend to build our home even, or perhaps especially, when away from home? I, for one, don’t see any difference between these two scenarios where I happened to play the role of confidante, the immigrant lady fussing about (substandard) standards of personal hygiene in her new country, and the expat lady who was devastated by her realisation that her favourite (home) brand of coffee wasn’t available where she had moved to.

Could a differential (or do I mean deferential?) guest status in a host nation be it? The word expat does carry nicer connotations than the word immigrant, but connotations have nothing to do with what we are: whatever the labels we go by when we’re working in a new country, we’re aliens. We represent a nation within someone else’s nation, a foreign body in someone else’s eye. Even when we are officially recognised as citizens of more than one country, like my Swedoguese children, that citizenship is always hyphenated and therefore always “special”. Vaidehi Ramanathan’s book Language Policies and (Dis)Citizenship explains the art of using citizenship as a weapon and/or shield, as needed. It is as if the countries ruled over us, people. So no difference there, either.

And then it hit me. The difference must lie in our entitlement to the languages we brought along with us in the move. Expat children attend schools featuring their home language. More often than not, these “international” schools offer monolingual schooling, which means that it’s fine for little expats to stick to remaining monolingual, if they so are and they so wish. Immigrant children attend schools featuring the mainstream language. More often than not, these local schools also offer monolingual schooling, which means that little immigrants must, in principle, become multilingual. I say in principle, because what happens in practice, more often than not, is that little immigrants find themselves discouraged to stick to any other language than the mainstream one.

There might be a few blurry edges here, though. Like immigrant families, multilingual expat families may also need to actively assert their right to keep their languages in good working order, as I report in my book Three is a Crowd?. Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl and Olivier Moliner put it this way, in their book Standard Languages and Multilingualism in European History: because of “the principle of ‘one language, one state, one people’ [...], multilingualism came to be viewed as an undesirable aberration.”

So how do our linguistic “aberrations” further impact the way we are treated, in more than one sense of this word? I’ll look at this next time.

© MCF 2014

Next post: Accent, dialect, or disorder? Saturday 8^th February 2014.