The Case For Bilingualism: Part Memoir, Part Science and Part History

In just a few days I will be starting an intensive beginner level French course! I have never taken a formal French class before but the opportunity presented itself and rarely do I turn down a free opportunity. I actually took Spanish in school from seventh grade through freshman year of college and I took two semesters of American Sign Language in undergrad and love both languages so much. I know that my knowledge of Spanish will make learning French a little bit easier for me. I am not fluent in Spanish, though it is a goal, and I did not complete the bilingual extension in New York that I started pursuing in undergrad due to unfortunate life- well actually death- circumstances but I still do have a passion for the Spanish language, the knowledge and skills from the bilingual and multicultural coursework I took and I love serving bilingual Spanish English students in the Bronx via telepractice. I no longer live in the city but telepractice has allowed me to continue treating students in the Bronx, the same geographic area I started serving as a student intern in undergrad. It’s nice to keep my Spanish skills up when I text or email my students’ families to remind them of an appointment or answer their questions and connect with them on another level in their native language. Sadly, I did not always have the enthusiasm and thirst for learning and using other languages that I started to acquire the summer before my freshman year of high school when I worked my first ever job at an International English College interacting with people from all over the world on a daily basis.

As a child I was bilingual exposed but I was monolingual. English was not my mom’s first language, nor was it her second! My mom grew up in Warsaw, Poland. She was a native speaker of Polish and she also natively spoke Russian because her mom was from Russia! My dad only speaks English or as he likes to call it, “perfect New Yorkese” and he even butchers English words which hurts my SLP ears. I didn’t hear Polish at home a lot because my parents communicated in English, but I did hear Polish and Russian sometimes when my mom was with Polish and Russian  speaking friends or communicating with her mom or speaking in Polish on the phone so I did not get to soak up the language through tons of daily exposure to it. My mom attempted to actually teach me her mother tongue. As a child during bath time, she taught me to label body parts in Polish and she also taught me a few Polish words and phrases, all of which I retained. I started to push back though by whining and complaining. I basically told her to leave me alone when she tried to teach me more Polish and of course she did not want to force anything on me, so she stopped teaching me Polish. I am kicking myself for being mean to my mom and not letting her teach me Polish, for pushing her away when she was just trying to share another piece of herself with me and for robbing myself of the ability to be bilingual from a young age and from being a bilingual Polish English speech-language pathologist. The worst part is that my mom died. She died when I was in undergrad before I really asked her to teach me Polish again and made time for her to teach me. The death of a loved one comes hand in hand with a lot of regrets. One of my biggest regrets in life is not letting my mom teach me Polish. I’m sorry, mom. 

“One of my biggest regrets in life is not letting my mom teach me Polish.”

You are probably thinking, “Of all the things to regret in life, why is one major regret not letting your mom teach you Polish?”. I regret not learning Polish at a young age because I’m not able to speak, read, write or understand a language other than English fluently. It is much easier to learn an additional language to the point of fluency and perfect that accent when you are younger. At the beginning of COVID-19 induced lockdowns, I arranged to have weekly Polish conversational exchanges online, completed worksheets that my conversation partners sent me and used Duolingo. I am 28 and can tell you that Polish is not easy to learn and that it is not ideal to be in your late twenties and attempting to learn a new language, especially one that doesn’t have linguistic features similar to the linguistic features of the languages you do know. My lack of fluency in another language has limited my work opportunities and made me less marketable as a speech-language pathologist. Bilingualism is a total asset in the workforce and bilingual and multilingual people are highly sought after because they can communicate in multiple languages with colleagues and customers. Bilingual and multilingual workers can get paid more than monolingual workers. If I had my bilingual extension in New York, I would get paid more working in the schools. If I was fluent in Polish, I could evaluate and treat people who speak Polish myself instead of referring them out to a Polish speaking SLP or in a worst case scenario using an interpreter while assessing the client and providing speech therapy to my client. Being bilingual would broaden my prospective clientele. If I was fluent in Polish, once I confirm my Polish citizenship and have legal rights to work in Poland, I would have a much easier time living and working in Poland if I chose to seize the opportunity to move there. I would also have an easier time vacationing in Poland if I could communicate with the locals in their native tongue. I would be able to fit in better with the Polish speaking community if I spoke and understood their language. Furthermore, the neuroanatomy of my basically monolingual brain pales in comparison to the neuroanatomy of the bilingual or multilingual brain.

The bilingual/multilingual brain is remarkable and superior to the monolingual brain. In a study published in 2016, researchers found, “The percentage of patients with intact cognitive functions post stroke was more than twice as high in bilinguals than in monolinguals. In contrast, patients with cognitive impairment were more common in monolinguals. In addition to other well-established factors, bilingualism emerged as an independent predictor of poststroke cognitive impairment. Furthermore, no differences were found between bilinguals and monolinguals in vascular risk factors or in the age at stroke, suggesting that the observed differences are not because of a healthier lifestyle among bilinguals” (Alladi et al., 2016). Wow! This study shows that after a stroke, bilingual patients retained the cognitive (memory and thinking) skills they had before they had a stroke and the monolingual stroke survivors more commonly had cognitive impairments and this is because of their bilingual brain and not because the bilingual participants in the study had healthier physical fitness regimens or diets! Marian and Shook share in their article, “The improvements in cognitive and sensory processing driven by bilingual experience may help a bilingual person to better process information in the environment, leading to a clearer signal for learning. This kind of improved attention to detail may help explain why bilingual adults learn a third language better than monolingual adults learn a second language.” (2012). Marian and Shook continued to indicate additional benefits of the bilingual brain throughout the lifespan including increased skills in the realm of “attention and conflict management in infants as young as seven months” and “a means of fending off a natural decline of cognitive function and maintaining what is called “cognitive reserve.” as people age (2012). Bilingualism can also protect against the decline of cognitive skills due to diseases such as Alzheimer’s (Marian & Shook, 2012). “In a study of more than 200 bilingual and monolingual patients with Alzheimer’s disease, bilingual patients reported showing initial symptoms of the disease at about 77.7 years of age—5.1 years later than the monolingual average of 72.6. Likewise, bilingual patients were diagnosed 4.3 years later than the monolingual patients (80.8 years of age and 76.5 years of age, respectively). In a follow-up study, researchers compared the brains of bilingual and monolingual patients matched on the severity of Alzheimer’s symptoms. Surprisingly, the brains of bilingual people showed a significantly higher degree of physical atrophy in regions commonly associated with Alzheimer’s disease. In other words, the bilingual people had more physical signs of disease than their monolingual counterparts, yet performed on par behaviorally, even though their degree of brain atrophy suggested that their symptoms should be much worse. If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help to improve its mileage, allowing it to go farther on the same amount of fuel.” (Marian & Shook, 2012).

If there are so many advantages to being bilingual/multilingual and having a bilingual brain then why doesn’t every bilingual or multilingual parent teach their children to be bilingual or multilingual?

In short the answer is because of how ignorance, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, linguistic prejudice, colonization and linguistic imperialism have distorted our views of people communicating in a language that the majority does not use and the fear and trauma these language users have faced as a result. There was a time when people emigrated to the United States and specifically did not teach their children the language from their motherland. The mother tongue was reserved for adult conversations in the home about things the parents and grandparents did not want the children privy to. English was looked at as the gold standard to have a better future  and the children were just expected to learn English in order to assimilate, be American and be successful. It is sad that immigrants were made to feel that English was superior to their native languages and that they and their children needed to communicate in English and only English.  Language is one thing that makes us who we are, language is believed to shape our thoughts and is a big part of our culture. Nobody should be shamed for communicating in their native language. The people screaming at bilingual people and telling them, “You’re in America, you should speak English” when families are communicating in a non English language at the grocery store are horrible and beliefs like this are harmful and tied into white supremacy and colonization. Ironically, these people screaming don’t realize that there is no official language in the USA and that there is a strong chance that the land they are standing on was stolen from indigenous people who have rich civilizations and their own languages that existed long before Columbus got lost, landed a ship and “discovered” America. Stripping language from a group of people has historically been used as a way to squash peoples’ identities. In the United States of America from the 1880s through the 1920s Federal Indian Policy called for the removal of indigenous children from their families and forced enrollment in government run boarding schools where the goal was forced assimilation and “civilizing” the indigenous people. “The foremost requirement for assimilation into American society, authorities felt, was mastery of the English language. Commissioner of Indian Affairs T.J. Morgan described English as "the language of the greatest, most powerful and enterprising nationalities beneath the sun." Such chauvinism did not allow for bilingualism in the boarding schools. Students were prohibited from speaking their native languages and those caught "speaking Indian" were severely punished. Later, many former students regretted that they lost the ability to speak their native language fluently because of the years they spent in boarding school.” (Marr). The United States is not alone in forcing the indigenous people to communicate only in English amongst other grave acts of abuse and oppression. In Canada, indigenous children were removed from their homes and forced to live in residential schools run by the Catholic church and the Canadian government where they were forbidden from speaking their native languages and were harshly punished for communicating in their native language “...including having needles stuck in their tongues. Some were even punished for not doing something asked of them in a language they did not yet understand (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015). Many students eventually lost the ability to speak and understand their language, which further separated them from their culture by obstructing their ability to communicate with their families and communities when they went home.” (Lemay). You can imagine the intergenerational trauma that the indigenous people endured and still endure today due to forced assimilation. “As a result of the Residential School Legacy and colonization, most Aboriginal languages in Canada are critically endangered, with some only having a handful of elderly speakers (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015).” How sad and shameful is that? These are by and far not the only examples of whole communities who face systemic language suppression. In undergrad, I learned that sign language was once a forbidden language due to ableism and society valuing spoken language over manual (signed) language.. “During the 1860s, a movement began to make U.S. deaf schools exclusively oral [communicating via verbal speech only]...During a conference of educators held in Milan in September 1880, delegates from deaf schools in France, Italy, several other European countries, and the United States debated the mode of communication to be used in deaf education. The American delegates had serious reservations about the effectiveness of instructing deaf students through oral means of communication, but the Europeans were impassioned about the need to restore deaf children to mainstream society, which they said could be done only by banning sign languages from schools and encouraging students to lipread and use the spoken language of their respective countries (Gallaudet, 1881). The resolutions passed at the closing of the conference ensured the dominance of oralism, and the deaf schools in the United States and Europe underwent major changes that affected not only Deaf students but also Deaf instructors, future generations of Deaf graduates, the livelihood of the Deaf community, and ultimately Deaf culture.” (Hill, 2012). Language suppression is not just a darkspot in a country’s history or a thing of the past. Language suppression unfortunately is still perpetrated today. “In the reform era of the 1980s, minorities [in China] were able to study in their mother tongues. But since President Xi Jinping’s rise to power in the 2010s, and his vision to build a Han-centric “China Dream,” his government has marginalized these [minority] languages in schools. Language suppression is not just a darkspot in any one particular country’s history or a thing of the past. Language suppression unfortunately is still perpetrated today. “In the reform era of the 1980s, minorities [in China] were able to study in their mother tongues. But since President Xi Jinping’s rise to power in the 2010s, and his vision to build a Han-centric “China Dream,” his government has marginalized these [minority] languages in schools. In Tibet, this policy, which authorities euphemistically call “bilingual education,” mandates that schools as early as kindergarten increasingly replace Tibetan with Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction. Children are taught the local language only as the subject of a single class. Efforts by minority communities to push back, even just to open a minority-language kindergarten, have landed advocates in prison.” (Wang, 2021).

 If you are bilingual, communicate in both of your languages proudly and unapologetically. You are keeping your culture and language alive, your brain is something to marvel at and you have many advantages cognitively, socially and in the workplace. When you speak your native language proudly and unapologetically, by extension you are fighting against the linguistic oppression that plagues our world. If you have children, communicate with them in your native languages, enroll them in bilingual education programs early on, read them books in your native language, and sing songs with them in your native language (Bialystock, 2016). If you encounter contrarians judging you or questioning you for communicating in your native language with your children, pay them no mind because they aren’t qualified to speak on the subject. The research is on your side. Bilingualism and multilingualism is an asset and should be encouraged and celebrated. Scientifically there is no harm in raising a child who is exposed to and can communicate in multiple languages but there IS psychological, linguistic and cultural harm in depriving a child of a language that their families and communities communicate in. 

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Works Cited

Alladi, S., Bak, T. H., Mekala, S., Rajan, A., Chaudhuri, J. R., Mioshi, E., Krovvidi, R., Surampudi, B., Duggirala, V., & Kaul, S. (2016). Impact of Bilingualism on Cognitive Outcome After Stroke. Stroke, 47(1), 258–261. https://doi.org/10.1161/strokeaha.115.010418 

Bialystok, E. (2016). Bilingual education for young children: review of the effects and consequences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 21(6), 666–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2016.1203859 

Hill, J. C. (2012, December). Language Attitudes in the American Deaf Community. http://gupress.gallaudet.edu/excerpts/LAADCtwo3.html. 

Lemay, J. (Ed.). (n.d.). Indigenous Languages. In Shingwauk Narratives: Sharing Residential School History. essay, Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/shingwauknarratives/chapter/indigenous-languages/. 

Marian, V., & Shook, A. (2012). The cognitive benefits of being bilingual. Cerebrum : the Dana forum on brain science, 2012, 13.

Marr, C. J. (n.d.). Assimilation Through Education: Indian Boarding Schools in the Pacific Northwest. ::: American Indians of the Pacific Northwest Collection ::: https://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/marr.html. 

Wang, M. (2021, January 28). China Signals Roll-Back on Minority Languages. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/28/china-signals-roll-back-minority-languages.