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Articles
Mainichi Daily News, Tokyo, Japan, January 10, 2001
Two Languages Not Enough?
The Mainichi Daily News ran an AP story about a quadri-lingual family in Switzerland. Mother Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa is from California. Her husband is Ecuadorean. They live in a French-speaking part of Switzerland and send their children to a German-language school. The children are, to the evident surprise of the journalist Clare Nullis, quite happy in all four languages.
While quadri-lingualism is not rare in Switzerland, especially among the diplomatic community in Geneva to which the Tokuhama-Espinosas belong, not to mention among the West African peoples cited in the article, it is rare in many parts of the United States. As Tokuhama-Espinosa says, "In the United States we're very poor at emphasizing the good qualities about multilingualism" despite the fact that it is becoming increasingly important in a globalised world with growing numbers of immigrants and expatriate workers.
With this in mind, she has written a book, Raising Multilingual Children, designed to give parents advice on how to do just that. She advocates introducing all the languages as early as possible and being consistent about language use. Each parent should speak his/her native language and opportunities should be sought out for children to encounter other languages in their environment, through schools and clubs. She says she learnt the value of consistency when the family moved from Ecuador to the U.S. and she decided to speak to her son in English rather than Spanish to improve the balance of languages in his life: he simply stopped speaking altogether.
Nullis consulted a couple of professors about the theoretical limit on the number of languages a child can master, and got rather contradictory responses. Tim Connell at London's City University, a linguist, said he does not believe that there are any limits on what a child can learn, given the right stimulus. Marilyn Vihman at the university of Wales, a developmental psychologist, said that one must be careful not to overload young children and must be ready to drop "unnecessary languages" if there are signs of distress.
Mainichi Daily News, January 10, 2001, p. 2. Stephen M. Ryan
