Tulips from Amsterdam
Here is Daisy, who is six. She lives in Holland with her parents, who are English - in fact they are my brother and his wife. I do realise that she and her sister Flo, below, who is three, look like they should be featured on Cute Overload (and thanks to Jacqueline Abrahams who took the photographs) but that's not what this is about.
It's about their amazing genius for languages.
When I tell British people that Daisy and Flo live in Holland they invariably ask "So do they speak Dutch?"
Yes, I say, they do.
"So do they speak Dutch to their parents?"
No, they speak English at home. And what's more, they can be speaking Dutch one moment to a friend and then, realising that it's Grandma from England on the phone, they can switch effortlessly from one language to another without even needing to be told to change.
Incredible! Everyone is amazed that they can do this.
And yet, in this part of England there are many Asian families where the children can speak several different languages - sometimes interpreting for their parents - and nobody is surprised at all. Is it that Asian languages are easier? Of course not. It's just that white British people are, traditionally, bad at languages and because English is spoken - at least to some extent - almost everywhere, we've been able to get away with it.
There's a curious kind of inverted British pride in saying "Oh, I'm terrible at foreign languages." I think it's time we grew up.
posted by Daphne at 8:46 pm
6 Comments:
There is fairly overwhelming evidence for a "critical period" for learning languages; it lasts until a child is about seven. Children in this period naturally learn every language that they are regularly exposed to; children aged seven and over who have never been exposed to language are never able to form sentences, no matter how much tuition they recieve.
(This annoys me considering the amount of effort I am currently putting into becoming bilingual; why did you never teach me French when I was small? Why?)
If modern languages were taught in primary schools in the UK, then, we would be able to wipe out the British problem with languages.
When I was young, the girl next door married an Italian and they lived in Milan, speaking English at home and, well, no suprises, Italian everywhere else.
They had a boy, Ricardo, who would come and visit his grnadparents. At the age of four he spoke both Italian and English, though unfortunately all mixed up in the same sentence. I had to keep stopping him and explaining I couldn't understand Italian.
Perhaps the confusion was that he was not at home, yet the outside world wasn't Italy, understandable for a four year old I guess.
[is that a spelling mistake in there Ms Franks?]
Yes, you are correct, and Emily belatedly noticed her interesting spelling of "receive". The reason I never taught her French when she was little was because I was too busy making her chant "i before e except after c" - - sadly to no effect at all, clearly.
I've never known Daisy and Flo to mix up the two languages - but then I've generally seen them in England where it's clear to them that English is spoken.
I find it amusing that neither of the children seem to mix up the languages, however their father, who grew up in England, occasionaly forgets simple english words and puts a dutch one in it's place!
Emily didn't pick up any foreign [i before e except after c and other times when it isn't either for no explicable reason] languages because unbeknown to you all she was devising secret plans on how to escape from coal cellars.
The plan she eventually came up with was two fold, one: be clever as carrots and so cunningly avoid being put in said fuel repository in the first place, two: have such an enormous bottom that if plan one failed, for some inexplicable reason [see above] logistal difficults would be insurmountable when it came to incarceration.
Finally a belated report from the horse's mouth on living with Nederengels!
Firstly, on English-speakers learning other languages. The thing is, learning another language to a fluent level is actually very difficult, and people only do it when there is a strong cultural and economic pressure to force them. This is why native speakers of English will hardly ever learn another language – mainly just if they emigrate. Generally, the equation is simple: the smaller the number of people that speak a language, the more likely they are to be fluent in a foreign language. Only the occasional eccentric enthusiast learns a language effectively just because it seems like a nice idea. So I’m afraid it’s not a question of English speakers ‘growing up’. If world oil trading was carried out in Ki-Swahili, or if 50 Cent rapped in Swedish, then English speakers would soon be excellent linguists.
It takes an equally strong pressure to make people ditch their native language and switch to speaking a foreign language on a daily basis, even with their children. People obviously do it if their partner speaks another language. But if a couple start speaking a foreign language to each other or their kids, it’s usually only as a result of trauma – like being a refugee – or because of a strong cultural pressure to make them feel their language is inferior. The parents of the Communist (see title of blog) did it. In the Communist’s early years his parents spoke to him in their own language, but then later switched to English. This was the 1920s, and their native language was Yiddish. “It’s not much of a language,” said my grandmother.
Today, indeed, the same negative cultural pressure is applied in Britain to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. In the Netherlands it’s Moroccans and Turks. Moroccan kids at primary school here are described as having a ‘taalachterstand’ – they are ‘behind in language’. Yet these are kids who speak two or possibly three languages: Moroccan Arabic, perhaps also Berber, and Dutch. OK, their Dutch is not up to the level of a native speaker yet, but ‘behind in language’ they are not – they have double the vocabulary of the average monolingual kid. And personally I think any kind of bilingualism is a good thing; it makes it so much easier to learn even more languages. You should hear the casual ease with which bilingual Daisy and Flo can trot out French or Spanish if you teach it to them. However, like Yiddish in the 1920s, Moroccan Arabic has a low status. So there are people right to the top of government who are naïve enough to suggest that parents should abandon the basic intimacy and warmth of speaking their mother tongue with those they love, for the sake of ‘integration’.
Recently, even speaking a high status language like English in public became a political issue here recently. If you haven’t been following Dutch politics, the Netherlands has in the last few years been in the grip of feverish xenophobia, dispelling the persistent myth about the country being particularly tolerant. The Dutch minister for immigration and integration is Rita Verdonk. She is a right wing conservative currently responsible for implementing Europe’s most draconian asylum and immigration laws. This includes things like yanking ‘illegal’ kids out of the classroom and locking them up for months, and handing the files of deported refugees over to the Congolese and Syrian police. According to the polls, Verdonk is the Netherlands’ most popular politician and she is currently standing for the leadership of the Dutch conservative party. Recently, commenting on a ‘code of conduct’ for citizens drawn up by Rotterdam city council, Verdonk implied that she thought it would be a good idea to introduce a ‘Dutch only in public’ policy and ban people from speaking other languages in the street. There was uproar of course, and the comments were exaggerated in the press, but many people heartily agreed. For a while, speaking to our kids in English in the supermarket felt like a political statement.
The thing is even with a ‘high status’ language like English, people seem to feel threatened by bilingualism, and can’t get their heads round it. Sometimes Dutch people will switch into English to speak to my kids because they imagine it must be too difficult for English children to speak Dutch. And then strangely enough, sometimes people do it the other way round, switching into Dutch to speak to the children during a conversation in English. They imagine that English is a difficult foreign language, and clearly too tricky for little kids!
Meanwhile of course the children are quite happy in either language, and very aware of which is appropriate in what circumstances. They don’t mix the languages up too much, but this is perhaps because they have language-obsessed parents. It doesn’t make them immune to speaking what we refer to as ‘Nederengels’, though. “I used to sit on dance but now I’m sitting on violin,” said Daisy cheerfully the other day. And she just had great difficulty translating a ‘stokbrood’ (baguette) in a conversation with her grandmother, for example. The thing is, I couldn’t remember the right word straight away either. It’s something we all have trouble with. Sometimes it’s because there just seem to be better words for something in one language than in the other. As an uitgangspunt, we do try to discourage Nederengels in the home, as it tends to leave ‘normal’ English people looking bewildered. However, now I have to stop writing, get the kids in the bakfiets and go and buy a krentenbol for Daisy’s Paaslunch.
(Michael = Daphne’s brother, father of bilingual Daisy & Flo, for anyone who doesn’t know)
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