Thu, Feb 23, 2012
Waltham Forest News, issue 27, 20 September 2010
Sunday 26 September is European Day of Languages, when people all over Europe will celebrate all the languages from all over the world that are spoken on our continent. Over 20 per cent of people in Waltham Forest speak a language other than English to a very high level, and we estimates that over 300 languages are spoken in the Borough.
This means any children living here have the potential to grow up speaking more than one language.
Being multilingual brings many advantages – to the children, to our community, to our economy. However in many cases due to a lack of information, commonly repeated myths or a lack of support, parents choose to speak to their children in English and children either never learn or quickly lose a second language.
It used to be thought that speaking more than one language confused children. Parents often still think that if a child speaks a language other than English at home, they will fall behind at school. These beliefs have been shown to be false, and research has demonstrated that multilingual children who are born in the UK or arrive when they are very young do at least as well at school and in fact consistently outperform monolingual children in certain thinking tasks.
English is a powerful and popular global language, but that doesn’t mean that we should needlessly jettison other languages. The English find it hard to imagine speaking several languages well, and many people believe that monolingualism is normal but, in fact, more than two thirds of people in the world speak more than one language.
Fortunately in today’s climate, this is not an issue where we are talking about needing to spend money. Parents will do all of the work and can teach their children languages if they can just be given a tiny amount of advice and support, and if we can change the outdated negative attitudes to multilingualism.
We now have a Deputy Prime Minister who himself has multilingual children. Perhaps finally this is the right moment for a major shift in attitudes. We should take this opportunity to debunk the old myths once and for all and ensure that we retain all of the languages that we are lucky enough to have in our community.
