A short hello!

I grew up in a multilingual family and now my son is also growing up with three languages. For me this is completely natural, the result both of migration and all my aunts and uncles marrying someone with a different language background, and now my generation is doing the same. I grew up with German and Hungarian, and later English. My cousins are Hungarian/Dutch, Hungarian/German, German/Finnish and German/English. And now my partner is Russian and one of my cousins is married to a Mexican woman. So more languages are coming in all the time, and we welcome them!!

It never occurred to me that this might seem unusual to others who come from more monolingual families. Since having my son, I have met many couples who are forming a bilingual family for the first time, (i.e. both partners come from monolingual families, but have started a family with someone from another country, or have both moved to the UK and are now experiencing their children acquiring English as well as their own language). I am often being asked for advice on how to raise a child bilingually, and this has made me reflect more on what it means to have had more than one language from early on.

I therefore decided to start to write this blog on my life with many languages. I have realised that for many people here in the UK, my language situation appears far from natural, and that I am often perceived as fascinating and quite exotic! I often get asked, for example, whether I feel confused about my "identity" or whether my son is "confused" because of all the languages he is being "subjected to." My answer is always, why should it be any more confusing for a child to learn that people speak differently than for a child to learn that cats and dogs are alive, and chairs and tables are not, that some people are tall, and others short, female and male, black, brown, white and so on and so forth. The reason we think of several languages as "confusing" for a child, is because we view the situation from a (monolingual) adult perspective. We are no longer confused by the fact that chairs are not alive, but languages confuse us, therefore they must be confusing!
But they really are not.

As to my identity, I really don't feel schizophrenic or uprooted. I am not somehow torn between two (or three?) places, and two languages. Maybe this is due to the fact that I have always been surrounded by multi-linguals so I don't feel that different from anybody else. There is this common misconception that a bilingual is the sum of two monolinguals, who is equally at home in both languages, and therefore equally not really at home in either.

I will write more about the myth of a "balanced" bilingual, i.e. that someone who is bilingual is equally competent and equally at home in both languages. This is completely context dependent, and I think it is quite unlikely for someone to have two identical contexts for both their languages. Most likely, a bilingual will use one language at home, and one at school, or one with friends and one with the family. Therefore the relative competencies will be different. But their language use is completely adequate for their needs. Therefore their languages are far from "deficient" which is another common misconception about bilinguals. But more of that later.

Another comment I get very often is that I must be very "clever" because I know so many languages, and that people wish they had had the upbringing I had, because it is such an advantage learning a language "for free" so to speak, and not having to work at it in some tedious language classroom. I really don't think I am "clever" and I would encourage anyone to try and pick up another language because it really is possible, even in adulthood!

So I would really like to use this blog to dispel some of these common myths of what it is like to grow up and live bilingually, and also to encourage others to join me in this world! I will also blog about the kinds of research that is happening into bilingualism, and the lessons we can learn from that.
In the mean time, I will leave you with the fact that there are more bilinguals worldwide than monolinguals. So if you join them, you are in good company!