<
https://theconversation.com/a-silver-lining-from-the-pandemic-how-lockdowns-helped-kids-learn-the-languages-their-parents-speak-205012>
"None of us is a stranger to the downsides of the pandemic. For families with
kids, kindergartens and schools closed during the lockdown, and parents had to
manage schooling and working from home.
Yet there is a silver lining: our research shows that, in families where a
parent’s mother tongue is not the language spoken in wider society, children
learned more about that language during lockdowns.
Let’s call the language these parents speak the “home language” and the
language society uses the “societal language”. Take me as an example: at home I
speak Shanghainese with my mum, Mandarin with dad, and Telepath with my cat.
But in the community and at work, I speak English, the societal language.
To many multilingual families, our kids’ home language often comes second to
the societal language, which dominates their language development as they grow
up. When parents witness this transition, they fear their children will
gradually lose the ability to use the language they speak. They fear that, as a
consequence, their children will lose touch with their roots.
Along with my colleagues, Elisabet García González and Elizabeth Lanza, we
conducted a survey of around 200 multilingual families in Norway (published in
the journal
Multilingua). Parents expressed their concerns about their
children’s development of home and societal languages. For example, one said:
Since our daughter mostly speaks [home language] with her father and
[societal language] with me and at kindergarten (although her father and I
exclusively speak [home language] to each other), her [home language] is
generally less advanced than her [societal language] […]
Multilingual children rarely use all their languages in the same contexts or
with the same frequency. This is often perceived as being more or less
“advanced” in one language than the other, but in reality multilingual speakers
use their languages as best fits their needs."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
