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

Needless to say, if parents themselves have a negative attitude towards
child bilingualism they will most likely not raise children with more than
one language. If one of the spouses has negative feelings about the other
spouses' language or does not understand it, there will be little chance of a
successful bilingual upbringing. For instance, a Dutch-speaking friend of
mine married a Frenchman who neither spoke nor understood Dutch. They
built up their lives in central France. My friend's husband had fairly
negative views towards Dutch and believed that bilingualism was bad for
children. In these circumstances, and given that she spoke fluent French
herself, my friend did not even attempt to speak Dutch to her two children.
She does not mind so much that her children cannot speak Dutch, but her
parents, whose knowledge of French is limited, are quite sad that their
communication with their grandchildren is necessarily quite limited
because of the lack of a shared language.
Positive attitudes within the family towards specific languages and child bilingualism are a
crucial foundation for children's bilingual development. Without positive attitudes, parents
would simply not speak more than one language to their children. In the remainder of this
article I will focus only on attitudes held by people outside the immediate family, and will go
on the assumption that families themselves have positive or neutral attitudes towards both
languages involved and that they have no particularly strong beliefs about child bilingualism
being a bad thing.
Unfortunately, many people outside the bilingual family hold negative attitudes towards
child bilingualism. Many people think that learning two languages at an early age is bad for
young children and makes them confused. Others think that learning two languages from
early on slows down the language development process. It is attitudes like these that made
Alana's preschool teacher tell Alana's parents to stop talking Swedish to her. I want to point
out that advising parents to stop speaking a particular language to their children goes
against the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states in Article 29,
division (c), that the States parties to the Convention agree that the education of the child
shall be directed to "The development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own
cultural identity, language and values [..]" (source per September 2011:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm). Besides, there is absolutely no evidence that
simply stopping to speak a particular language to a child will automatically increase the
child's proficiency in another language. That would be like expecting that if you stop playing
football you will get better at tennis! You will get better at tennis only if you spend more
time practicing tennis, not because you gave up football.
Typically, negative attitudes towards child bilingualism go together with negative attitudes
towards whatever language is not the majority language. Thus, Alana's preschool teacher
didn't advocate stopping the learning of Finnish, the majority language, but advised stopping
the learning of Swedish, the minority language.
Such negative attitudes are also at the basis of school rules that require children to always
just speak the school language (except in foreign language classes): at many monolingual
schools all over the world it is common for teachers to forbid students to speak any other
language at school than the school language. Schools have the right to do this, but it is
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