The Reasons for Bilingualism

The main reason for bilingualism is obvious. The child shall learn more than one language. Most parents who raise their children bilingually do so because the parents have different native languages and the children have relatives in two languages and cultures. Those parents want their children to be able to communicate with all their relatives, and they probably want to pass on both their cultures as well.

Another very evident reason is shown by the example of immigrant families who speak their native language at home and the foreign language of the country they are living in outside of their home. In order to give their children an easy start into life in the foreign country, they have to enable their children to learn the environment’s language.

Apart from these two examples, however, what reasons do parents have to raise their children bilingually?

Language Ability

Children with more than one native language have a neurological advantage for learning more languages, and they already know at least two languages to start with. Bilingual children will always have it easier to learn new languages. Even those who gain bilingualism after the critical age (see primary/secondary bilingualism) will have the advantage as every new language they learn adds to the pool of resources they can draw from when trying to learn a new language or improve one of their languages. They build a huge pool of vocabulary to use for comparison when they try to guess the meaning of an unknown word, and they build a huge grammar pool as well which can help them understand grammar structures of new languages.

Intercultural Ability

When we learn a language, we always learn some part of the speakers’ culture as well. Even if we only learnt the words and grammar and stuff, we would still learn something about the speakers’ culture as the culture of a region always reflects in their language. It is reflected in idioms, common phrases, even the way words are built. However, as it is, we learn a language in context, and context means more cultural insight. Which phrases are used in which context? Why? What does that reveal about the culture behind the language? We don’t think about these things when we learn a language, but unconsciously, we will take it in. When we travel at some point in our life, we will likely have it easier to understand the mentality of the people we meet because we learnt part of their culture with their language.

Cognitive Ability

Bilingual children are able to switch between different tasks more easily than monolingual children. Experts believe this is due to the fact that their brains are trained in high cognitive effort from keeping languages apart and preventing one language to interfere with another one. In short, bilingual or multilingual people's brains are better trained for multitasking.

Coming up next week: Common criticism and fears in regard to raising children with more than one native language.