Which language?

It’s that time of year when fam­i­lies re-adapt to the old rou­tine after the school hol­i­days. How­ever, as we all know, this year will be dif­fer­ent. After the chal­lenges of most of 2020 to date, at least we can be thank­ful that kids are ac­tu­ally re­turn­ing to school, for now. The sub­ject of this col­umn re­sults from many con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with par­ents down the years re­gard­ing which lan­guage to use in a mul­ti­lin­gual fam­ily. It may seem like a straight­for­ward ques­tion to some par­ents, but I’ve found that to many it isn’t.

First of all, let me say that I’m the fa­ther to a young man whose mother tongue is Cata­lan, and I’ve spent years in con­tact with par­ents who speak a lan­guage other than the one used around them on a daily basis.

So here are my con­clu­sions: lan­guage is con­tex­tual. It there­fore makes sense to use the ap­pro­pri­ate lan­guage for the ap­pro­pri­ate con­text. This is what leads many mul­ti­lin­gual fam­i­lies to in­stinc­tively switch to the lan­guage of the coun­try they are in when on the move. In other words, while our son was grow­ing up, when vis­it­ing my coun­try of birth, Eng­land, my wife would switch from her own mother tongue to Eng­lish. How­ever, as the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Eng­lish in our house­hold, I would speak to him in Eng­lish all the time. This could lead to fairly strange in­ter­ac­tions in­volv­ing code-switch­ing (when more than one lan­guage is used in the same ut­ter­ance), and it is pre­cisely this phe­nom­e­non that some par­ents think may be a bad idea or con­fus­ing for their chil­dren. That is not the case, how­ever. Chil­dren are not at all con­fused by dif­fer­ent lan­guages being used at the same time when they are fa­mil­iar with them. The only neg­a­tive ef­fect it may have is that as they grow older they strug­gle to ac­cess cer­tain words in their vo­cab­u­lary bank in one lan­guage be­cause they’ve heard it more in an­other lan­guage due to code-switch­ing. But in the mod­ern glob­alised world, this is sim­ply not a prob­lem. In fact many peo­ple find it en­dear­ing and love to see oth­ers switch lan­guages and learn new words in a for­eign tongue.

But back to the orig­i­nal point, namely, which lan­guage to use in a fam­ily set­ting, as­sum­ing that both par­ents can speak each oth­ers’ lan­guage. In my opin­ion, the an­swer is that each par­ent should use their own lan­guage when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with their child or chil­dren, and then in com­mu­nal set­tings it de­pends on the con­text. A good ex­am­ple is when we used to talk about school, we would all switch to Cata­lan be­cause that’s the lan­guage the school used, and con­stantly try­ing to trans­late all of the ed­u­ca­tional ter­mi­nol­ogy in the mid­dle of a con­ver­sa­tion sim­ply doesn’t make sense in that con­text. By con­trast, if we went to see a film in Eng­lish, then we would all talk abut it in Eng­lish af­ter­wards.

To back up my views I would refer you to sev­eral par­ents I know who re­gret­ted the de­ci­sion to speak to their chil­dren in the local lan­guage rather than their own in daily in­ter­ac­tions when they were grow­ing up, only re­al­is­ing later that they had missed an op­por­tu­nity. In sum­mary, when it comes to lan­guages kids are much more ca­pa­ble than we think if ac­cus­tomed to hear­ing and using them from an early age.