Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

7. “Early Bilingual Development: the Role of Attitudes and Language
Input”
Dr. Annick De Houwer
Professor of Language learning and language teaching
European Research Network for Bilingual Studies (erbis; www.erbis.org),
University of Erfurt, Germany, and
Eunice Shriver Kennedy National Institute of Child Health & Human Development, USA
Introduction
Many young children grow up hearing more than one language (1). Whether they
themselves will actually speak more than one language is not something that can be taken
for granted. In fact, one in four children who are raised with more than one language will
speak just a single language on a day-to-day basis. This single language usually is the school
language.
For the parents and families of those children this is often a problem: most parents want
their children to learn to speak the language they speak to them. When children do not
speak the family language or do not speak it well, parents may feel guilty, rejected, angry, all
of the above or more. Usually they do not understand why it is that their children will not or
cannot speak the language used at home. Children themselves, as they get older, may feel
regret and/or shame at not being able to speak their family's language.
The fact that children do not speak their family's language becomes a strong threat to the
survival of a minority language if many children who are hearing that language at home do
not speak it. Of course, languages can be learned throughout the lifespan. Children can, as
they get older, try to re-learn their family language, but this takes an extensive amount of
conscious effort, time and expense.
There are many factors that help explain whether young children who are raised bilingually
will actually speak two languages rather than just one. This research-based article gives a
brief overview of factors that can to some extent be influenced. These include attitudes and
the nature of the input situation, that is, how often and in what circumstances children
under age 6 hear their two languages.
Some examples
In order to make my later discussion more accessible I present four examples of children
growing up in a regional minority language context. These examples, though not real, have
been inspired by the countless children raised bilingually that I have met, read about, or
heard about (2).
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