In a country often slated for its monolingualism,
London is emerging as a hub not only of suave bilinguals, switching between
French and English in South Ken cafés, but a new polyglot breed: the capital’s
trilinguals. The city’s global pull has turned them from a marginal group to an
established tribe, who search for au pairs with three languages (a niche on
Gumtree) and plan for schooling to keep their children’s spoken skills intact,
while adding a couple more later for good measure to top up their International
Baccalaureate.
Strictly speaking, trilingualism means two
languages spoken at home and another (usually of the host country) outside. It
comes easiest to, for example, Franco-German parents bringing up children in
London — whose status as a financial hub has helped spawn many of the new
breed. And globalisation has its romantic side, which ends up increasing the
number of trilingual families. In the past few months, I’ve met Svetlana, a
native of St Petersburg, married to a Spanish husband, whose children switch
effortlessly between parental languages and back to English when they head off
to school.
Over at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in
Mayfair, Helène Pfeil, a twenty-something educated in Strasbourg in French and
German, organises high-level conferences in fluent English. She grew up
speaking German to her father and French to her mother and sat her
school-leaving exam in the French and German systems. She says she thinks
mainly in French but dreams in all three languages. The main advantage of a
background in different languages, she thinks, is that it breeds a natural
appetite to pick up more: she’s also learned some Chinese and is trying out
Slovak, which her boyfriend speaks.
As well as recent incomers there are also many
"heritage" trilinguals such as the Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg’s
family. He speaks Dutch with his relatives, a mixture of Spanish and English
with his wife and children and has a Spanish-speaking au pair. (A UN job
shouldn’t be a problem if the coalition thing doesn’t work out next time.)
London’s Spaniards seem particularly undaunted by
multilingualism. At my daughter’s music class, one of the long-suffering
music-mamas, Ana, a lawyer from the Canaries, is married to an Englishman.
Bilingualism being the natural state of affairs at home, they decided to send
their daughter to the German school in Richmond, which meant that her primary
education was conducted in a language neither of her parents know. That might
be too daunting for many of us but has produced one of the more organised
examples of a London teenager used to assessing her own end-of-term reports and
filling in her own admin forms.
A sense of adventure and an expectation of
challenge seem to come naturally to trilinguals: one of the reasons they tend
to be high-fliers. Companies love them, because they are so much easier to send
abroad, and fret less about how well their children will fit in. So more of the
British-backed international schools now try to cater for third and fourth
languages to maximise flexibility, whether the next move is to Nanjing or
Madrid.
But our rigid way of teaching languages doesn’t
help. There’s now strong evidence that the way to get and retain fluency in
more than one language is by teaching other academic subjects in foreign
languages, to widen the vocab base and familiarity. That’s still a rarity in
British schools, which isolate languages as a subject in themselves and then
wonder why pupils aren’t at ease in them.
London’s long history of linguistic and cultural
diversity means that it also boasts lots of less high-rolling trilinguals for
whom the Tower of Babel is just everyday life. My children have spent school
holidays with a friend who is Greek Cypriot, with a Turkish husband, watching
Turkish TV, listening to recipe instructions in Greek and somehow emerging with
intact English and a smattering of the other two languages. My friend’s
daughter studied international relations (you might say she had a head start)
and has married a Japanese national, so their small boy is nicely geared up for
four-way chatter.
Parents sometimes fret about children becoming
confused when a number of languages are on the go and trilingual children are
prone to what the language analysts call “code-shifting”: dropping words from
another language into a sentence. But this is often more about convenience than
confusion. When I met Natasha Randall, a Russian interpreter living in Tiblisi
a couple of years ago, her baby son babbled in his native Georgian. With the
family settled in London, she says it is hard to keep him speaking the
language.
“There is a serious economy to children’s minds,”
she says. “They know what will get the results faster.” How the brain adapts to
communicating in three ways has become a relatively new area of academic study.
For one thing, writes Susanne Barron-Hauwaert, a researcher on the experiences
of trilingual families, “it is very different from bilingualism since the three
languages can’t be balanced in the way two are”.
Once schooling starts though, children change their
first language quickly to that of their schoolmates, so the local tends to win
out as the strongest language. It is apparently unusual to speak (let alone
write) three languages with equal fluency: a bit like the triathlon, one
element tends to lag a bit, though the level can still be high if all the
languages continue in use.
Another factor is an informal pecking order which
means that “prestige languages” associated with economic success or global
mobility tend to win out in three-language families over minority ones. Yet
what counts as prestige can change fast. The usefulness of Russian and Mandarin
now means that parents will try to ensure their children’s fluency in them,
whereas families like Mr Clegg’s, whose grandmother was Russian, often
emphasised Western European languages instead.
What about the rest of us who failed to have the
foresight to marry a foreigner and hire a multilingual au pair? As a linguist
by background, I have so far done a pretty poor job of imparting languages to
my offspring outside the fairly minimal requirements of the school curriculum.
But we can at least introduce a bit of multilingualism by getting smaller
children used to watching foreign films and learning a few phrases using the
subtitles as a dictionary. Like pretty much everything to do with languages, it
is all easier the earlier you get going and the more habitual it becomes.
Something I’ve learned about multilingualism is
that it is rarely wasted. When I arrived back from Russia in the Nineties, I
was still surprised to encounter Russian spoken in London. Now it allows some
of the most interesting eavesdropping in the capital, and a straw poll at the
parties at the Frieze art shindig found Russian and German were the most common
languages for art chatter after English. Mandarin may soon catch up and
Japanese return to fashion if that country gets out of its economic doldrums.
Once you’ve acquired trilingualism, of course, you
will not want to restrict languages to Asia and Europe. A globetrotting
colleague passing through Heathrow noticed an elderly woman vainly trying to
communicate with a welter of officials addressing her in various European
tongues. He ventured a sentence in Swahili, which he’d picked up as a child in
Africa. It worked a treat. After all, London is the home of the adventurous
Colonel Pickering just as much as that perfectly-spoken Anglo-snob, Professor
Higgins.
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