Common Criticism and Fears

Parents who decide to raise their children with more than one language are often confronted with criticism by their family, neighbours, even paediatricians. I am trying to give an overview of the most common criticisms and fears and the truth behind them in order to help parents to make their choice, and to defend it if necessary.

1) More than one language is too much for a child's brain!

Nope. Sorry, but whoever tries to convince you of this "fact" doesn't know how our human brain works. Children are easily able to learn more than one language at the same time since their brains already possess all the necessary connections for every language in the world. In fact, most of these connections degenerate after the initial window of learning one's native language because they haven't been needed. Newborn children are able to distinguish all about 70 phonemes used by any of the world's languages while grown-ups have lost this extraordinary ability. Most people can only distinguish the phonemes used in their native language(s). Although we can re-learn to distinguish between other phonemes, it takes time and a considerable effort once the initial ability is lost.

2) The brain only has limited resources; thus, when children grow up with more than one native language, some other ability will suffer since the resources are used for the additional language.

This is nonesense as well. The human brain is an extraordinary organ, designed to learn. Our ability to learn new things is only limited by our motivation and time. Some things might come to us easier while others take more effort, but when it comes to the bottom line, we can learn everything we want to and have the opportunity to.

3) Children will learn none of the languages fluently.

This actually depends on the way multiple languages are learnt. Usually, there should be no problem for children to learn more than one language fluently, and to be able to distinguish between the languages. However, children need to be able to distinguish which language is spoken in which context, or by whom, and those people using a language should be fluent (or at least very good) in it. One of the most common methods to bilingualism is the one parent--.one language approach where each one of the parents speaks only in his or her native language with the child. That way, the child will be able to learn both languages fluently and without any danger of mixing them. On a side note, many younger children initially mix their languages when they first start to talk; that is simply due to the fact that they don't yet know all the same words in both languages, and that the pronunciation of words with the same meaning might be easier in one language. When children just start out talking, they usually use the easiest words; however, they already know that they are using different languages. Usually, they stop mixing languages before they start school since they have acquired a great enough vocabulary in both languages by then.