Genuine Bilinguals

When Indians like us take our kids to school the first time, we worry whether our kids will pick up English fast enough. The need and benefits of knowing English, other than their mother tongue, is obvious.

That’s not the case with Americans. Except if they are married to foreigners. Like Robert Lane Greene, who is married to a Finnish woman, wants to “raise a genuine bilingual”.

It was interesting to read his take on the whole topic since for us, the benefit of knowing English is obvious, whereas for them, the benefit of knowing anything other than English is, well, questionable.

But we’ll get back to the benefits later. Let’s start with the “how to” part. Lane can think of two strategies in case of parents, who between themselves, know multiple languages well: “one parent, one language”, and “one language at home, the other outside”. Most Indians follow one or both patterns while raising our genuine bilinguals. And yet I wasn’t aware of this problem:

“Bilinguals hit developmental milestones at the same rate as their monolingual peers. But they are prone to errors, and their total vocabulary is divided between two languages. So they usually lag behind slightly in the vocabulary of the schooling language.”

Maybe I didn’t even know of the problem because I have always been far more fluent in the “vocabulary of the schooling language”. Or is Greene right when he points out another finding?

“The culprit was poverty, not bilingualism.”

The prevailing wisdom in the West today points to the “bilingual advantage”:

-         Cognitive strengths;

-         Dementia sets in a few years later, on average;

-         Better brain function recovery after strokes;

-         Ability to understand different perspectives better;

-         Better ability to plan and carry out complicated tasks.

But none of these are definitive: many of these findings are contested and/or not reproducible.

So even though I couldn’t relate to (or even care about) most of the benefits, the last benefit on the list above did hit a cord. I can absolutely relate to the willingness of all parents to take a shot at “anything that might keep the child focused on that calculus problem and ignoring the nearby smartphone”.

After all, when it comes to their kids, all parents pick Newton over Steve Jobs, even if the common item for both was Apple.