Multilingual beginnings

One of the striking impressions I get from my dealings with language learning, language use and multilingualism is our tendency to look at what is not there. I don’t mean the commendable mindset that urges us to keep doing more and better because we know that we haven’t done our most and best yet, I mean the way we tend to disregard what is there.

I plead guilty too. When I took my firstborn to one of her routine check-ups, another 11-month-old, also a girl, was in the waiting room with her mum. This other girl was crawling all over the place at breathtaking speed, and grabbing at anything and anyone in sight to lift herself up and try to walk, whereas my girl, who had rehearsed a few half-hearted attempts at rolling and dragging herself on her tummy a few months earlier and soon given up, was doing what she did best at the time, which was sitting there on the floor and enjoying the show. My eyes glued to the little acrobat and I became instantly unsettled. What was wrong with my baby? Why wasn’t she moving at this late age?

I then noticed that the other mum was, in turn, staring at my girl, which added to my discomfort. She must be wondering about my motionless child too, so I decided to praise her child before she could condole with me about mine. “Sorry I’m staring”, I said, “but I couldn’t help noticing how active your girl is, compared to mine”. “Oh”, she replied, “thanks for telling me that! I was staring myself, at the impressive amount of teeth your girl has. Mine has none”. We had to laugh, both of us.

Informal observations like these are one thing. Quite another concerns official verdicts about our children’s development falling short of standard milestones, and this is no laughing matter. Take vocabulary, for example, the traditional tell-tale indicator of early linguistic health. If we assume that words reflect the first signs of linguistic development, then lack of words, or of a specific amount or type of words, means lack of expressive abilities. So much so that children who have yet to acquire words are said to be at the “pre-linguistic stage”. That is, these children don’t have language.

We’ve nevertheless known for quite a while that, prior to the appearance of words, babbling and babbling patterns provide reliable indicators of typical development. But descriptions of babbling often concern what analysts can recognise as syllables, vowels and consonants, that is, “word-like” baby utterances. Should we then look for words and word-like productions as evidence of the earliest linguistic resources that children have available? We might be looking in the wrong places, actually. Perhaps what wordless babies are said to lack, according to popular benchmarks, is instead what popular benchmarks themselves lack.

Take prosody, for example. For ages 5 and upwards, Sue Peppé and colleagues are currently developing an instrument for assessment of child prosody, PEPS-C (Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems – Children), but our understanding of how very young children use the prosody of their languages has been most lacking. Yet we’ve also known for many years that children begin making sense of their languages by making sense of prosody, and I was thrilled to be able to confirm this in a study of my own children’s language development.

Before they had any recognisable words in any of their two home languages, Portuguese and Swedish, the children started using any sounds that they were able to produce as fillers, that is, as handy carriers of salient prosodic patterns of each of their languages. They also babbled things like blh-blh-blh (to be read in Portuguese, [bʎˈbʎbʎ], where ˈ indicates a stressed syllable) and hadda-hadda-hadda (ditto in Swedish, [hadahada ̏ hada], where  ̏  represents the so-called ‘double-accent’ of the language).

The children switched between these uses of their resources when addressing people whom they associated with each language, or when looking at pictures of them – as well as when talking to toys which they got from Portuguese or Swedish speakers and which, therefore, also “spoke” each of these languages. The baby-dialogues that they fashioned in this way sounded Portuguese or Swedish, because the prosody was Portuguese or Swedish. When the first words appeared, the children accommodated them to the linguistic melodies that they had by then mastered, and went on using their old prosodic strategies as replacement for words which they hadn’t yet learnt in one of their languages, or which for some reason failed them at some time or other. Just like all of us use fillers like thingamabob or what’s-its-name, for the same reasons.

These earliest linguistic resources were not “words” of either language, but the children were nevertheless using their two languages. I’ll have some more to say about multilingual child strategies for learning language in the next couple of posts. 

© MCF 2011

Next post: Children, toys, and languages. Saturday 15^th October 2011.

BLINGualism

I should start by saying that I unquestionably prefer the word multilingualism to the word bilingualism, to refer to uses of more than one language. I nevertheless thought that BLING, rather than MLING, would make better sense in the title of this post. What I want to talk about is the compulsion that some of us feel to wear their multilingualism.

Throughout history, people have enjoyed finding reasons which, in their own eyes, make them better than other people. This penchant takes several forms, from small children sneering at classmates that their daddy is a policeman and hence above all common mortals, or that they own at least one more wristwatch/mobile phone/TV channel than whatever number the competition claims to own, to bigger children trumping cocktail party-mates with having connections above law enforcement authorities, or having shed more body fat at their latest workout binge.

Multilingualism has nowadays entered the fray, as a tell-tale sign of superiority: if you have one language and I have more languages than you, I win. Among willing players of this game, ‘have’ seems to be the keyword. What people like to boast about is naturally bound to change, with the times and the places, but certain game rules seem to endure. For example, that what you have is what defines you, and that having more of whatever you can have is a good thing.

Multilinguals, whether going by that name or not, have indeed been associated with good things, like higher education and social breakthrough, at least judging from what Western history has kept in its records for us. Those who ‘made it’ were the ones who had more than one language in their repertoire, because they had to learn the language(s) of the intellectual elite of their time, in order to make it. According to Jean de Drosay’s Éléments de la grammaire quadrilingue (Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones, 1544-1554), Latin, Greek, Hebrew and French were a must in the Renaissance, for example. But history often concerns itself with, well, elites, and what we know now is that the common people are mostly multilingual. It thus seems odd to me that, nowadays, we should wish to claim privileged intellectual status for a majority of the world’s population.

Take, for example, those of us who happen to be multilingual and describe themselves as amazing or astonishing, by describing multilingualism with these very words. The only term of comparison that comes to my mind for expressed wonderment of this kind is ‘monolingualism’. Are multilinguals remarkable because they are not monolingual, then? And conversely, of course, are monolinguals unremarkable because they are not multilingual? I’ve tried to imagine, really hard, what would be accomplished for our understanding of human language uses and human language users, by having monolinguals describe monolingualism as amazing and astonishing.

Images: David Shankbone; David Vignoni/Stannered

(Wikimedia Commons)

I think the problem might be that human beings appear to have difficulties dealing with difference. Qualitative differences between us are routinely interpreted as quantitative items which make some of us better or worse (off) than others, and which the privileged ones should duly decorate themselves with, in case no one notices any difference otherwise. To me, wearing number of languages like chattels, for this purpose, simply perpetuates the myth that multilinguals are ‘special’. Being multilingual was special when we were persuaded that being monolingual was the norm, and being multilingual goes on being special when we found out that being multilingual is the norm. Using whatever number of languages we need to use to function appropriately in our respective environments cannot be special, because we all do it.

We all adapt, in other words, which is a good thing to be able to do. Or is it? In some cases, the results of proficient adaptation arouses frowns instead of smiles. Like, for example, adapting uses of language to new technology. I’ll have a few things to say about this next time.

© MCF 2011

Next post: Breaking rules, or making them? Saturday 13^th August 2011. 

People see, people do

Creativity seems to be a defining characteristic of human beings. If we human beings weren’t creative, the reasoning goes, we wouldn’t have made it to where we are now (whatever that means) – and we wouldn’t, of course, be able to extol creativity as the path to getting there (ditto).

Our languages serve our creativity. In Western parts of the world, we learned this in 1836, when the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt published his book Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues (translated into English as On Language), and remarked that language “makes infinite use of finite means”.

Humboldt meant that we can do with our languages whatever we need to do to make them work for us. The way we learn to do this, however, doesn’t seem to be all that creative.

Photo: MCF

Children do not only end up using their languages the way somebody else does, whether at home or in school: their language learning is deemed successful only when they actually do so. I’m not arguing that we learn our languages through simple imitation: my work on child language makes clear my views on this. I’m saying that like the proverbial apple and its tree, linguistic ripeness seeds its own orchard.

I can give one example, from Singapore. Little Singaporeans are known to say things like the following, where I transcribe in ordinary spelling what is heard:  

          I miss a class this morning. 

         That happen a long time ago.

Why do little Singaporeans say this? Because that’s what they hear big Singaporeans say. I’m talking about Singapore English here, by which I mean the standard version of the language that is used in the country, not Singlish. These uses of verbs have been ascribed to ignorance of past tense forms, or to other ignorance subsumed under general labels like “incomplete learning” of the “correct” forms. For both little and big ones, by the way.

Now, because I’ve lived in Singapore for many years, because I’ve listened to a lot of Singapore English, and because I found it odd that a whole country should go around speaking incomplete English, I decided to check matters out. Instead of the grammatical deficiency with which Singaporean speakers were diagnosed, my study, Past tense suffixes and other final plosives in Singapore English, found a phonological issue, one that is besides shared by other speakers of English throughout the world: the well-known instability of [t] and [d] at the end of syllables.

In Singapore English, present tense trust and bend can sound like ‘truss’ and ‘Ben’, both present tense send and past tense sent like [sen], and past tenses left and went like [lef] and [wen]. A Singaporean’s best friend, with no verbs involved, is as much a [bes fren] as the [-st] of missed is [-s] and the [-nd] of happened is [-n]. In other Englishes, the next world is also the neck’s whirl, the past is pass, and facts are fax. Singapore English is just/juss one more example of this. You can listen to the corpus of speech data on which I based my study.

The issue is this: if children fail to conform to the linguistic models that are available around them, they also fail to acquire linguistic appropriateness to their daily environments. But if they do conform to models that for some reason are not deemed acceptable, then they, and whoever seeded those models for them, risk their reputation as appropriate users of language. Similar issues of serving as you have it served arise, for example, among self-labelled OPOL families. There was a time when researchers puzzled over “OPOL” children’s mixing of their languages. The puzzlement vanished when the presumed OL-users, who already were or had by then become multilingual, were found to do likewise, despite reporting in good faith that they didn’t.

What we say and what we think we say can be two quite different kinds of language. Those of us who doubt this might want to pursue some very entertaining fieldwork, listening to what we actually produce, speech-wise. We often (mis)take ourselves for users of desirable, standard conventions, which is fine: self-flattery is another defining characteristic of human beings. The problems begin when we take non-standard uses of language, whose label reflects factual observations, for sub-standard uses, a label that reflects opinion. From there to “wrong”, and so in need of correction, takes but a small step.

Standard uses are also the ones contemplated in assessment instruments. A child’s linguistic input, from elders as well as peers, is accordingly part of routine observation, in speech-language clinics. Taking into account a child’s natural way of copying uses of language is a necessary step to deciding between difference and disorder. Sharynne McLeod discusses similar issues in her blog Speaking my Languages.

I’ve now returned several times to matters of assessment, in this blog, and to the kind of knowledge that allows us to trust both our assessment instruments and our judgement when using them. Next time, I’ll deal with a rather broad issue about knowledge itself. Namely, how do we get to know what we know? Or perhaps I should say: how do we get to know what we think that we know.

© MCF 2011

Next post: How do we know? Saturday 25^th June 2011. 

The natives and the speakers

Let me start with the good news. We are, all of us without exception, native speakers. This may come as a surprise to those of us who have had close encounters with the second/foreign language world, but is nonetheless true. It means that we are all competent users of language – more or less competent, of course, depending on all sorts of individual and social factors that make us clumsy or proficient in whatever we do.

Now the bad news. We are, all of us who use second/foreign languages, failed native speakers of them, which is the meaning of the more politically correct label “non-native speakers”. This is because non-native productions are routinely compared to native models, for purposes of quality control, and native speakers of someone else’s non-native language are never more or less competent users of this language. They are competent, period: they have no accent, which means they have a good accent, and they probably have no grammar and no vocabulary either, because their grammar and their vocabulary are quite good too.

Now the obvious news. None of us second/foreign language users can ever become native speakers of those languages, for two reasons: because the word native in “native speaker” means ‘born into’; and because our mothers might balk at the prospect of giving birth to us all over again in a language that they don’t speak. Second/foreign language theory and practice nonetheless appear to entertain the hope that we somehow can. Using native models and assessment methods draws on the assumption that learning a language means learning to impersonate someone, instead of learning to use their language.

Now the funny news. The term “native speaker” means ‘monolingual’: all the native speakers to whom second/foreign language learners have been compared since it became standard practice to do so are monolinguals. Given that language learners are becoming multilingual – those who already aren’t, that is – such comparisons reflect the belief that ideal users of language are monolingual (rings a bell?). Indeed, multilinguals who become multilinguals from birth are not native speakers of their languages, because multilinguals across the board are also routinely compared to native speakers, and you can’t compare a thing to itself. Even funnier, multilinguals are not non-native speakers either, because they are also compared to non-natives. Makes one wonder what multilinguals are.

And now, the extremely funny news. Even those of us who do become indistinguishable from native speakers, including where native speakers themselves can’t tell the difference, fail to reach native proficiency: we have near-native-like proficiency instead (I’m not joking, seriously!). This is because we human beings, for all our native competence, are apparently fallible in our judgements about our languages. We don’t notice what we don’t care about, whereas the machines that we build to make our judgements for us do: the proof is in reported examples of millisecond differences in, for example, the amount of puffed air that emanates from native and non-native vocal tracts pronouncing the sounds at the beginning of English words like pan, tan and can (this is the “aspiration of voiceless plosives”, in the insider lingo).

Near-native-like users of languages could well make ideal candidates to international espionage agencies – barring suspicion that the enemy might also have access to millisecond-detectors, of course. As it is, they and other non-natives already have enough trouble at the job market: for language teaching posts, for example, it has been debated whether native speakers with no teacher training whatsoever shouldn’t be preferred to non-natives with full teaching credentials. I’m not joking here either.

The bottom line is that if you’re looking for differences, you’ll find them: milliseconds are popular in other research comparing multilinguals to monolinguals, but the relevance of such findings to everyday communication, to language teaching methodologies, or to clinical diagnoses is by no means clear. To me, inventing the word-play of expressions akin to “near-native-like” on the strength of such features simply self-fulfils the belief that native speakers have exclusive rights to competence in their languages, and the related curse of the Big Bad Funny-lingual.

Setting up goals, and educational goals to boot, that forever elude common mortals brings to mind the “___ jokes”, those jokes that are largely the same in different parts of the world, but are only funny when the blank fills with nationality words that the jokers think it’s funny to joke about – telling a Finn, say, how many Portuguese it takes to screw in a light bulb is not very funny. One of these jokes suggested the following parallel to me: an outsider (= the aspiring language user) asks a local (= the native language user) for directions to a place (= native proficiency). The local thinks a while and replies: “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” It is the same no-can-do mindset that, faced with can-dos, changes gear to call them “gifted learners”. This is yet another ill-defined player in second/foreign language scenarios, to which I will return some other day.

Thomas Paul Bonfiglio’s book, Mother tongues and nations. The invention of the native speaker, explains that native speaker originated as a time-and-space-bound construct. The unquestioned relevance that it came to gain in second/foreign language settings across the board may well need some re-thinking, not least in view of the confusing meanings that associate with it, as noted above. The presumed, assumed, implicit and implied “definitions”, if any, of other terms that we find in similar settings, such as mother tongue, or first language, might also benefit from a thorough spring cleaning.

I believe that all this vagueness stems from the artificiality of attempting to classify users of language not by their uses of their languages, which naturally form a cline, but by their all-or-none birth rights to (one of) them. Next time, I’ll talk some more about natives, and about non-natives too. Specifically, about why wishing someone a Happy Birfday, for example, which we hear from native and non-native speakers alike, may somehow sound less damnable coming from the former than from the latter.

© MCF 2011

Next post: (Non-)native common ground. Wednesday 4^th May 2011.

Language percentages

Amounts of language can be measured. We can measure number of words, for example – assuming that we all know what a word is, of course. (Have you tried asking yourself this question, by the way?) We can measure length of utterances, counted in words or in assumedly less dodgy units that linguists call morphemes (do a Look Inside! search for morpheme here). We can measure number of utterances, phonemes, metaphors, syntactic constructions, and/or sequences of all of these.

We then compare our observations about these amounts to amounts that are available from standardised averages or norm-referenced databases, to reach conclusions about the relative state of health of an individual’s linguistic repertoire. Some people even like to do this to support claims about rich(er) and poor(er) languages, or sophisticated and primitive ones, and label their users accordingly, on the understanding that languages own things and that their users are owned by them (in more than one sense of owned).

Measuring amounts of language is different from measuring amounts of languages, that I touched upon previously, but both issues end up raising issues to do with multilingualism. One recurring question I get from worried parents in multilingual families, second only to the question of which single language they should model in order to secure proper child multilingualism-to-be, concerns how much language they should use. How many and how much thus top the list of perplexities about multilingual interaction.

The suggestions that the queriers themselves submit to my appreciation speak of the bewilderment that we’ve allowed to run loose about being multilingual. Should they hire tutors, nannies, or both, strictly sworn-in to scheduled and exclusive use, to the child, of one of the languages of the parents, so that the parents can in turn pledge themselves to use another of their languages (one each), in order to nurture healthy multilingualism at home? Should the parents themselves switch languages (those who dare defy the OPOLicy, that is) and, if so, who should speak what at what times of day, or days of the week, to avoid confusion in developing brains? Shouldn’t they stick (those who daren’t) really, really to one language each, and so expose their children to really, really health-inducing parental dialogues where one parent always says things in language X and the other always responds in language Y?

OK, some people do tend to get a bit worked up about the latest health-related fads they read about in the local newspaper. We should all currently rinse our nasal cavities with specially crafted implements and saline solutions offered in a range of prices that serve plebeian and aristocratic noses, for example, or think twice about antioxidant contents before brewing our daily cup of tea. Or hire monolingual tutors and nannies to talk to multilingual children in the languages that multilingual parents should not talk to them in. But these questions also speak of the anguish, the guilt, the daily burden of making language decisions before daring to open one’s mouth, that we can but glimpse through them. I’ve had parents begging me for help about what to do when they wake up in the morning, every morning, with no idea about which language to use to their own children.

All this may not be surprising, in fact, in view of comments, from lay and specialist sources alike, to the effect that, for example, bilingual children get only half the input in each language. By extension, we may reason that trilingual children get ⅓, quadrilingual children ¼, and so on. Who will want to be blamed for providing incomplete linguistic input to their children? Aren’t incomplete languages the very essence of semilingualism, and isn’t multilingualism but a fancy name for semilingualism? Fractional maths is also popular in other multilingual settings, those involving language learning in later life, where amounts of exposure to language(s) and whole vs. partial language input also come into question. I will have quite a lot to say about this in coming posts, but what both settings have in common is first, that the percentile gold, 100, is represented by one language, all of the time; and second, consequently, that no matter how much language is used in multilingual settings, “how much” never means ‘enough’.

It is therefore interesting to think a while about why questions concerning best languages, or main languages, also crop up so often in discussions of multilingualism. Upon which of the language fractions of a multilingual should this honour be bestowed, how and why? I’ll try to work this out next time.

© MCF 2011

Next post: First, main, best. Wednesday 16^th March 2011.

Little multilinguals

Is this possible, to be little and multilingual? Well, as possible as being little and monolingual, one would guess. If, that is, someone should decide to start asking questions about being monolingual, for a change. Since no one has, there was a time, in the bad old days, when the answer to this question was “no”.

Researchers on multilingualism started off persuaded that the natural thing for children (and adults, by extension) was to operate with a single language – or a single “language system”, as the issue was discussed then. The lively controversy about this matter was called the one vs. two systems, on the interesting additional assumption that “more than one”, as far as languages are concerned, means ‘two’. Evidence for the command of two languages, or lack thereof, was for example gleaned from what became known as translation equivalents: either children had words in each of their two vocabularies for exactly the same things, or there was something wrong with their (bi)lingualism. Not with the assumption that x-lingualism, where x stands for any number, means ‘monolingualism in x languages’.

Then François Grosjean spelled out the Complementarity Principle that describes multilingual use of languages, and so multilingual acquisition, in an article titled The bilingual individual: “Bilinguals usually acquire and use their languages for different purposes, in different domains of life, with different people. Different aspects of life require different languages.” Since then, it has become unfashionable to go on looking for x-to-x equivalence where none can be found: if, say, one language is used with mummy, another one with daddy, and another one with peers, then a child will have mummy-relevant, daddy-relevant and peer-relevant words, syntax, phonology, tones of voice, pragmatic uses, and so on, in each language.

This statement of facts about what being multilingual means should, one would guess, have put an end to the practice of blaming multilingualism for what some people decided should be there, or not there, in other people’s languages, and especially in small people’s languages. Old habits are resilient, though. The bad old days may be gone, but the current days are hardly any better. Instead of being blamed for deficiencies in different languages of otherwise healthy children, multilingualism now appears equated with deficiency tout court. It is otherwise hard to explain why publications and sections of publications dedicated to language acquisition continue to include expressions like “exceptional” circumstances or developmental “varieties” in their titles, to lump together observations about child clinical disorders with observations about child use of more than one language.

That the focus remains on the “effects” of multilingualism, and on how multilingualism “affects” our little ones, is all a matter of perspective: we might as well dedicate ourselves, as usefully, to wondering about the effects of being monolingual, and about what they affect.

The relevant questions must surely be those that guide our understanding of what is typical and what is disordered linguistic development, as I’ve argued elsewhere. Their answers are the ones that teach us, parents, teachers and clinicians, what we should, and should not, worry about. The next post, a guest post, redresses another deep-rooted myth: that there are (worrying) differences between how little multilinguals and little monolinguals develop their pronunciation skills.

© MCF 2011

Next post: =Guest post= Bilingual phonological development is like driving in traffic, by Brian A. Goldstein. Wednesday 2^nd March 2011.

Multilingual woes and joys

Opinions have divided rather neatly about what being multilingual does to you, ever since multilingualism became worthy of attention in Western(-like) parts of the world.

Early views about multilingualism took it as only marginally less noxious than the plague. Today’s views market it as wholesale cure for all human woes, from dissolving cognitive rust to ensuring world peace. Few of us seem willing to agree that multilingualism is about as exciting as monolingualism: you go about your daily business using whatever linguistic resources happen to be relevant for going about your daily business.

Multilingualism is currently good for you: we should pop a couple of tablets of it every day, to keep us healthy. It triggers assorted enhancements, which leads to the interesting conclusion that most of the world’s population must be enhanced. But – there’s always a but – we should also beware of side effects.

Trendy headlines first extol unqualified “benefits” of multilingualism. Then the small print reveals that the research which is invoked to support trendy claims uses very, very careful language: possible correlations are suggested in specific areas, according to experimental investigation of a restricted number of informants of a particular age in particular settings, depending on how the data are analysed. The small print also reveals that there are “costs”.

Benefits and costs are, as usual, calculated against monolingual benchmarks. We are told, for example, that multilinguals are more gifted socially than monolinguals, but take a few milliseconds longer to retrieve names of objects from memory. The reason is attributed to the milli-time that a multilingual brain takes to decide which language is the relevant one to provide the required answer in. Although I am not aware of research showing the impact of millisecond lags on everyday communication, the message is that we trade off instant brain responses for more elaborate social skills, or vice versa. Milliseconds, incidentally, were also found of relevance when comparing the achievements of “late” multilinguals and “native speakers”, an issue to which I will come back in due time.

We are also told that multilingualism vitalises the mind, but results in poorer vocabulary in each language. I confess that I’m not entirely clear about what reports like these are meant to mean. Is it that monolinguals have astonishing vocabularies and dull minds? By the same reasoning, that would be the benefit and the cost of being monolingual, respectively. I also have some difficulty with the labels that are used to announce these reports. Speaking of multilingual response delays and poor vocabulary is, to me, a little too close for comfort to the terminology of suspected language disorder.

The decisive argument pro-multilingualism is usually said to be that, despite any costs, it rewires the brain. But so does motherhood, as reported in studies that, to the best of my knowledge, investigated monolingual pregnancies, and so does driving taxis, including monolingually, in London.

In short, the arguments about multilingual “benefits”, today, strangely remind of those about monolingual “benefits”, almost one century ago. Small print and costs included. We don’t seem to have learned our lesson, because our current beliefs and our current drive are the same as one century ago, only the other way around: everyone should become multilingual. I’ll have more to say about this next time.

© MCF 2010

Next post: “We shall overcome monolingualism.” Wednesday 1^st December 2010.

The fight for a fair deal

We spend a lot of our time and energy assessing, ourselves and others. We look and re-look in the mirror for the perfect fit to the image we wish to project. We slot objects, people and attitudes into the mental rating boxes that guide our opinions, and we sometimes do this at first sight. Less benign emotions than love can take root in this way too.

Assessment experts, among them teachers, medical doctors and other clinicians, rely on professional rating boxes. Whether lay or specialist, our expectations appear to carry a surprisingly significant weight in how we gather information. Surprisingly, because they’re often based on nothing more substantial than hearsay; and significant, because they mean that we already know the answers to the questions that we nevertheless keep asking: we need not look any further.

I can give one example. I was once taking my regular walk in a nature reserve, in Singapore, where I live, and I heard a group of tourists heatedly debating whether they would be lucky enough to see a crocodile. One of them had read it somewhere that crocodiles are a common sight in Southeast Asian cities. A glimpse of an unmistakably reptile tail, which suddenly scrambled away from us, made his day: “There it is! I just saw one!!” What this visitor actually saw was a (large) monitor lizard. I took a picture of his (her?) friend, or perhaps of her-/himself, on another occasion. 

A (rare) specimen of Crocodillus Singaporeanus.
Photo: MCF

But he (the visitor, not the lizard) will swear he never, ever, laid eyes on a monitor lizard, because he “knew” that crocodiles might be around, not lizards. He will tell all his friends that he saw a crocodile in Singapore, who will tell all their friends, who will then all “know” that there are crocodiles in Singapore. Their source is the indisputable affidavit of an eyewitness.

On a rather more serious level, the way in which expectations affect observations was studied in a school, in the late 1960’s. The findings became known as the Rosenthal Effect. Like the children in this school, multilinguals get labelled before observation, and are therefore expected to be the special case, as mentioned earlier. One common expectation, for example, is that being multilingual is a self-explanatory “diagnosis”. Expectations, incidentally, are also what lies behind national and other stereotypes. If you “know” that an X will provide evidence of W properties, you’ll both see W and disregard all evidence of non-W. The same effect can explain, for example, successful therapies with placebos. And superstition.

Multilinguals, their caregivers, school teachers and speech-language therapists are all in the same boat. Awareness of multilingual behaviour is not required for teaching or clinical certification, even of multilinguals, and language assessment tools are standardised for monolingual users. All too often, teachers and clinicians thus have no reliable tools to guide their assessments. Adapting or translating tests works only partially and often badly, for the reasons we saw before: each language is unique. If dismissing adaptation and translation as a handy solution sounds far-fetched, have a look at what is involved in the mammoth task of making speech-language assessment usable, in this ASHA Directory (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association).

To top it all, there are speech-language assessment instruments for only a tiny fraction of the world’s languages, which of course raises problems for the assessment of monolingual children too. For multilinguals, yet another issue arises, paradoxically, where assessment instruments do exist for one of their languages. This is usually the mainstream language, which may not coincide with the “main” language of a multilingual. On the (monolingual-based) assumption that testing one language is enough to assess the overall linguistic ability of a multilingual, two things can happen. First, that underachievement in that one language may lead to suspicion of language delay. Children may be referred to further therapy, when what they would need is a language tutor. Second, that monolingual assessment naturally misses features of typical mixing, whose regular patterns in fact aid in the diagnosis of language disorder among multilingual children.

Other typical characteristics of multilinguals may go undetected, or pass as atypical. We don’t just mix languages, but also gestures, posture, attitude. A speech-language assessment, despite its name, crucially involves observation of body language, including body and eye contact. The absence (or presence) of standard signals of this kind may be culture-bound. For example, falling silent with a lowered gaze may be interpreted in some cultures as the absence of a response, whereas in others it is the presence of a mark of respect.

The problem is not so much that children (and the rest of us) are not usually socialised in speech-language clinics. The problem is that clinics and clinical tools belong to specific cultures too. What, many of us may wonder, can be a more striking image of childhood well-being than cuddling a teddy-bear? Many of us may indeed wonder, but not all. Perhaps not even most of us. Some of us may wonder instead why someone would want a child to engage in close bodily contact with a miniature representation of a beast of prey. 

Cuddly toys are part of the extensive array of clinical aids routinely used to elicit linguistic and other behaviour from children. One common test involves having several toys made available to a child, and then ask the child to grab, in turn, the ones named by the clinician. Children may fail this apparently straightforward test of vocabulary and object recognition, not because of a language problem, but because their culture forbids them to touch objects that do not belong to them. The child wouldn’t have either the sophisticated social and linguistic awareness that is needed to explain, preferably politely, this “non-compliant” behaviour to an adult. Perhaps the child’s culture doesn’t allow children to address adults, or question their demands. Or perhaps the culture does allow this, but not in the language that the child happens to share with the clinician. If you’re interested in research, reviews and reports on these issues, have a look in my recent collection, Multilingual Norms.

School teachers and school kids don’t have it much easier, whether in monolingual or multilingual settings. The language tests that they have to set and sit may also misrepresent their own uses. Here’s one example, taken from a real-life paper in a real-life English school subject:

And here’s one suggestion for you: a) First, answer according to your own use of English, without thinking much – the more one thinks about language uses, especially when they come robed in correctness, the worse it gets, I find; b) Then ask friends, relatives, schoolchildren, teachers of English, to answer too, in the same way; c) Then compare your results; d) Then come back to us on this blog with what you found out.

I won’t tell you (yet) what the test creator took as the right answer. I’ll do it in a comment to this post a few days after publishing it. Your little survey will provide you with a database of actual uses of English, for this particular example, that we can also discuss here. On a suitably large scale and with suitable statistical treatment, this is how norms of usage are established.

To round up my thoughts for today: the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, in his 1986 book The man who mistook his wife for a hat, that “Our tests, our approaches [...] our ‘evaluations’, are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers.” Granted, he was talking about severely disordered patients, but my point is that we all come out as more or less severely disordered if there are no means of assessing our “normality”. Sacks’ plea concerned a woman with severe mental decomposition, who nevertheless found ways to integrate her world with nature and music, for example. Engaging with nature and music was not part of standard neurological assessment tools.

This is why I mean the word fight in the title of this post quite literally. We may lack the tools that do justice to whoever we’re assessing, but we must at least realise that we do lack them. If we insist on fitting everyone’s feet into Cinderella slippers (another cultural stereotype, I know), which were fashioned for Cinderella’s feet, there is no way we can provide ourselves with the means to offer a fair deal in assessment: we’ll keep finding Ugly Sisters. Or crocodiles.

I have one last thing to say, a confession to make. You may have noticed that I had some difficulty trimming all that I wanted to say about assessment, particularly child assessment, into a post of reasonable dimensions. I had tremendous difficulty. This is an issue that lies very, very close to my heart, but I also know that no one has time to read blogs that just go on scrolling down and down forever. I will come back to these matters. Standardisation, not of tests but of the languages that are used in tests, is in line next but, until then, I hope you will let me know of your own concerns about assessment of multilinguals, here or privately. We need to learn from one another. I also meant quite literally what I said in my welcome message: this blog is for you.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Code makers and code breakers. Saturday 6^th November 2010.

Typical multilinguals

Besides the number of languages that they use, there is one major difference between monolinguals and multilinguals: we talk about multilinguals as such, whereas we don’t talk about monolinguals as monolinguals. I don’t think anyone ever wondered whether monolingualism can affect a child’s linguistic development, or worried that school monolingualism might impair reasoning abilities, for example.

Multilingualism comes labelled, and labelled things are worthy of attention. There are websites, associations, counsellors, self-help guides, research teams, project grants, academic journals, corporate businesses, books and blogs and whatnot dedicated to multilinguals by name – this blog included, just see its title –, but seldom are we explicitly reminded that virtually all that we know about language and languages draws on monolingual data (maybe someone will now consider starting a blog called Being Monolingual?). This means that we have a lot of information on monolingual norms of language use. These norms have routinely been extrapolated to account for multilingual uses too, on the assumption that I discussed in a previous post. That is, people have been talking about multilingualism through words and concepts that apply to monolingualism. The result is that we have virtually no information on multilingual norms.

Establishing norms of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, is important for one very crucial reason: without knowing what is typical, we cannot tell what is deviant. This is because assessment, whether informal, academic or clinical, is basically a comparison. We suspect that our child may be running a fever today because she is behaving funny today, compared to her normal self. But how can we tell whether our multilingual child is showing signs of disorder or just being, well, multilingual?

A few pointers can help us decide whether or not it is time to seek professional advice. Barring conditions like impaired hearing, which is surprisingly common in very early childhood, my take is that the presumed health of each of the languages of a multilingual matters less than what healthy multilinguals do with their languages. Let me explain that. Say you’re raising your two-year-old in Mandarin and English. She speaks in single words, either Mandarin or English. Then she finds out that words can be put together, which allows her to say more things all in one go. And one day she produces something that you interpret as want nǎi, ‘want milk’. Your child is not confused, nor is she mangling Mandarin, or English, or both: your child is using Mandarin and English. In short, your child is being multilingual. Same thing if she later on starts using the words of one language with the grammar of another. Or even if she starts stuttering, around this time. Learning to speak fluently in more than single words takes years of sophisticated coordination of breathing with dozens of muscles, in any language, whatever the number of languages. Children also stumble and fall, while they are learning to walk. If you want another example of what tiny multilinguals will do, have a look here (Hi, David!).

My point is that your child (the language user) is doing new things with her languages (the tools), which are also new to her. Practising the use of new tools is a good thing. I, for one, had to figure out how to set up this first blog of mine, and how to post to it. It took me inordinate amounts of time and aggravation, but now I can do it – sort of, I’m still learning too. My point is that we need to focus on the user’s developing skills, not on predicaments of tools. We need to look at what we do with our languages, not at what we do not do. Like this:

1. Multilinguals use their languages in different ways. One with mum, another one with dad, another one with siblings. In case you’re wondering, yes, this is the scenario in my own family. Or several languages at home, several others at work. Or one language to cook, another one to argue with the cat. Or any other way. The sky is the limit.

This amounts to saying that:

2. The languages of a multilingual cannot be equivalent. If multilinguals could use all their languages in the same way, they wouldn’t need all their languages. One all-purpose language would be enough: we would all turn into monolinguals.

Which means that:

3. Multilinguals draw on all of their linguistic resources, not on the resources afforded by single languages, in order to be able to function appropriately in their environment.

Which defines a multilingual, q.e.d.

... Hmm, some of you may be wondering. If all of this is so standard and so healthy and so fine, how come there is such hullabaloo about mixing? Mixes are uses of several languages in one utterance or, more generally, in a communicative exchange. They’re sometimes called codeswitches, codemixes, blends. “Mix” is a neater word, I find. I also wonder quite a lot about the mix fuss, so I propose to talk about it in my next post.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Languages come in flavours. Saturday 23^rd October 2010.

Not being monolingual

As far as I can tell, multilinguals are quite ordinary human beings: they’re many and they’re ancient. There are more multilinguals than monolinguals the world over, and the use of several languages by the same individuals has been documented as far back in time as historical sources allow us to peer into our linguistic habits.

Those of us who use a single language throughout life are monolinguals. Multilinguals are, therefore, not monolinguals, as Monsieur de La Palice might have been credited with saying. Nevertheless, and strangely enough, there are cumulative indications that multilinguals should in fact behave like monolinguals. To me, this is about as reasonable as wishing that a monolingual behave like a multilingual. To Jacques de La Palice, this would be proof that sometimes it makes sense to spell out truisms.

I’m sure I am not alone in having been confronted with musings such as: “I see, so you speak several languages. But which one is your mother tongue?”, or “Multilingual, you say? Oh. In which language do you think, then?” Questions of this kind all have one thing in common: they attempt to extract the monolingual from within the self-described multilingual. They reach for the-expected-user-of-only-one-language that somewhere, somehow, must be lurking in there and struggling to surface for air.

We owe the reasoning behind such questions to the Ancient Greeks. Their enduring trend of thought about language uses (they must have thought in Ancient Greek) is best described by their endearing label, “barbarian”, which applied to anyone who failed to make themselves understood to educated users of Ancient Greek-only. Several centuries down the line, the assumption appears to take the form that if you’re human, you’re by definition a user of one language. Using several languages is therefore the special case.

Examples of monolingualism taken as default state of humankind crop up everywhere that it matters. At home, parents in mixed families are told to stick to one language each to address their children, even if they are themselves multilinguals. Better still, they should see to it that their offspring grow up with one main language (or a dominant one, or a primary one, or a first one, and so on). This is probably to make sure that the little multilinguals that they insist on nurturing also have a fair chance of becoming proper big monolinguals. In school, behavioural quirks, difficulties with academic performance and other signs of non-conformity are attributed to a child’s multilingualism. In clinic, confirmed signs of linguistic or cognitive disorder in a multilingual child result in the recommendation to switch to a single language, usually the mainstream language, in the child’s home.

Even on the understanding that multilinguals cannot be monolinguals, the expectation is that they should behave like several monolinguals, as many as the number of languages in their repertoire. This (rather unsettling) view of some human beings as composed of other human beings does not describe multilingualism: it describes something that I have no idea what it is, and that I call multi-monolingualism just to be able to talk about it. I suspect that taking multilingualism for multi-monolingualism is what makes people take multilinguals for patchwork: expressions like incomplete command of languages, semilingualism, split personality, deficient exposure, come to mind.

Monolingualism thus seems to be, still today, a programmatic approach to linguistic and other well-being, with both preventive and curative effects. Against monolingual mindsets and monolingual benchmarks, it is clear that multilingualism will emerge as special. But this cannot be right, because the majority of the world’s population cannot be exceptional. There must be default behaviours among multilinguals too. So what is it that makes a multilingual a multilingual? This is what I’ll attempt to work out in my next post.

© MCF 2010

Next post: Typical multilinguals. Wednesday 20^th October 2010.