How multilingualism influences children cognitively and socially
Below is a short article I wrote as an entry for the 2020 shwa linguistics competition. Most of the content only serves as a brief account of the problem, and more discussion on the topic is encouraged.
Language is long believed to be determined by the cognitive mind. The branch of sociolinguistics also believes that language has a close connection with personal identity and power dynamics in society.
It has become a recent trend for parents to worry about their children mixing up grammar when learning different languages or being unable to speak entirely in one language, thus having to switch to the other for certain words. Some who support the Whorfian idea of linguistic relativism (the idea that language shapes the way people perceive the world) even bring out a more extreme claim, stating that early exposure to multilingual learning will infeed the child with contrasting ways of categorizing and processing information from reality, thus having a deterring effect on the development of children’s cognitive system.
However, research in cognitive linguistics and generative grammar has shown that such a worry is largely overstated. Steven Pinker, a supporter of the Chomskyan view of generative grammar uses his book A Language Instinct to argue that the ability to process and categorize language is an instinct that is biologically inherited, thus hardly influenced or changed by later learning process of languages. He further gives a description of Noam Chomsky’s argument of Universal Grammar and uses it to prove that in essence, all languages have a similar core and only differ with respect to certain parameters (Pinker, 80). His argument summarizes and highlights that we share the same cognitive system for all languages, which shows that little negative impact can be done on children during early exposure to multilingualism.
However, in terms of its psychological effect, multilingualism is likely to socially influence the child in the long run. This starts from the very reason many pursue multilingualism. In the modern world, English has become the most widely spoken lingua franca for international communications. The countries associated with the language (the United States and Canada) and their economic powers convey the hidden message that proficiency in this language would also lead to a boost in wealth, which is also the reason for the multilingual-frenzy we see today. Thus, the incentive for multilingualism on children already places a preference for one of the multiple languages they are learning.
In the long run, multilingual children are inevitably led to realize the superiority of one of the languages that they speak, which causes a detrimental effect on their willingness to speak the language at all. This can often be found in some of the developing countries, such as Malaysia and the Philippines, which uses both Malay and English as its official language. Due to the higher status and linguistic capital the latter has, English is greatly encouraged by the government (two students were expelled from speaking Filipino at school) (Ruanni, 120). All these connotations from a sociolinguistic perspective show that if a child has early access to a language (at most times a dominant one like English), he will gain a rather beneficial position in society. However, this also means that societal views and objective factors will lead the child to have a preference for the more dominant language, which possibly decreases his willingness to speak his mother tongue. This is more likely to happen as children start learning the dominant language at a younger age. As fewer people of the younger generation decline to speak their mother tongue, this also imposes the risk of language extinction for minority languages.
References:
Pinker Steven. The Language Instinct. Penguin Books. 1994.
Ruanni Tupas (2015) Inequalities of multilingualism: challenges to mother tongue-based multilingual education, Language and Education, 29:2, 112–124, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2014.977295
