Bilingualism and its Effect on Modern Family Life

The following is a follow-up to the group blogging topic of Bilingualism in expat couples. It is the first (unedited) draft of an article I wrote in 2005 for our school magazine. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of people, but their stories are true.

If you are like many people today, you probably think that speaking two languages well is a must for the future. But how does one go about bringing up children bilingually? What are the actual experiences of bilingual families?

Defining the term
Bilingual families, for the purposes of this article, are those in which the two parents have two different native languages – or have the same native language but also speak a common second language – and speak both languages to some degree with their children. The children in bilingual families grow up with knowledge of the two languages, and, in some cases, of the two cultures as well. Naturally, each family has its own way of dealing with bilingualism, and there are obviously many factors that come into play.

What the experts say
According to several articles I read when investigating the subject, it is very important for parents to decide beforehand just how bilingual they want their children to be. Will they be happy if their kids achieve a good level of listening comprehension in the second language, even if they don’t actually speak it? Will speaking and understanding the two languages – with one language being dominant over the other – be enough? Will they want their children to be literate in both languages? And finally, there’s the question of how far the parents are willing to go to help their children reach that level of bilingualism.

Bilingualism in families around us
With these tips in mind, I set out to discover how some families here in ***** cope with bilingualism. My first interviewee was Ted Banks. Born and raised in Utah, USA, Ted and his Mexican-born wife, Magda have three children. I asked Ted if they’d had a plan from the beginning to raise their children bilingually, and he said “yes, of course. Our plan has always been to speak English at home, unless we have visitors.” It isn’t always easy to stick to the plan however, because his wife’s native language is Spanish, and the children speak Spanish at school. When they are in public, he and his wife always speak Spanish, “except when we want to speak confidentially about something. Then we switch to English.”

Ted said that with his kids it’s not always easy. “Many times I speak to them in English and they answer me in Spanish.” I asked him how much of the two cultures his kids have absorbed, and he said that their knowledge of Mexican culture is very well-developed, but the American side perhaps needs reinforcement. “For example, they do all their reading in Spanish, which could be due to the fact that reading is something they see as forced, something required by school authorities.” On the other hand, Ted says his kids are perfectly comfortable surfing the internet and watching movies in English!

Finally, I asked Ted if the confusion between the languages had ever caused a funny incident and he told me that his youngest daughter once scolded him at the store for saying a bad word. It seems that when he asked her in English what she wanted, she answered him in Spanish, “Popohuates.” Ted said, “Popohuates? There’s no such thing! Don’t you mean, cacahuates?” Then she said very firmly, “SHHH, Daddy. You shouldn’t say ‘caca’!”

Another father’s experience
Tim Taylor says he came to Mexico from Canada some years ago because he wanted to leave the 1st world behind, and he embraced Mexico – the culture, the language – thankful “to get away from the materialism of life in a developed country”. He met and married a native of Veracruz, and began to make his living as an English teacher. However, at home they spoke Spanish, as his wife didn’t speak English. When I asked if he and his wife made a plan to raise their two sons bilingually, he said, no, there was never a conscious decision on his part to speak only English to them. At any rate, he believes that “fathers traditionally have less quality contact time with their kids than mothers. I was working long hours and when I got home, I wanted to feel really united with my family. When you’re a family, you’ve got to be all together. When both parents are not bilingual, it doesn’t work trying to maintain communication in the other language.” However, he says, his sons can speak good English now – though he doesn’t think they’ll ever be English teachers!
When I asked Tim if he ever felt at a disadvantage speaking with his kids in a language that wasn’t his native language, he said matter-of-factly, “Part of the package of parenting is knowing that it’s not easy. Communication problems happen even when a family is monolingual.” For Tim, patience is the key!

A completely bilingual family
My next candidate was Tom Hill, also from Canada, whose wife is from Mexico City. Tom says he met Maru when she went to take an intensive English course in his hometown, Toronto. “I was her teacher so right from the beginning, we established English as the language we would speak to each other.” When their daughters were born, they decided that Tom would always speak to them in English and Maru in Spanish. He and his family later moved to Mexico, where they have lived ever since. During the girls’ formative years, Tom says, “Maru and I were pretty strict about the bilingual rule, but once we felt that the job had been done, we slacked off.” When I asked Tom if his kids always responded to him in English, he said, “No, sometimes they answer in Spanish. But there’s never been any pressure on them to respond in one language or the other.”

I asked Tom about other ways he contributed to their bilingualism, and he said he always read them bedtime stories in English when they were little. Today both his teen-aged daughters are completely bilingual, even though they have never studied in bilingual schools. Finally, I asked Tom if there were ever any situations that made him feel at a disadvantage, being the “foreigner”. He said that sometimes in social situations he feels a bit at a disadvantage. He claims to be “quite witty” in English… whereas in Spanish, he misses many opportunities to make a witty response because he’s not as quick to think of one in Spanish.

From a subjective viewpoint
As further backup to this article, I decided to interview my own kids. I should warn you though, that as parents in a bilingual family situation, my husband, originally from Mexico City, and I – a native Texan – broke the cardinal rule that was stressed in the articles I read. We did not prepare our kids at all for a bilingual education. Nonetheless, all of our kids have eventually, and to different degrees, become bilingual.

In my own defense, I began with the good intention of speaking to the children in English, but I didn’t always have the opportunity, as I was living with my mother-in-law at first. When the older ones began public elementary school, they became very nationalistic and didn’t want to have anything to do with their American side. They wouldn’t speak English except when we were alone, and even then, only for a few minutes at a time. Eventually I took them to Texas for one school year so that they would be exposed to English for awhile. But after that year, we were back in Mexico for good. In the end, the children never fully embraced the language until they decided for themselves that speaking English was something to be desired, and this I feel is the key to becoming truly bilingual.

I asked my husband how his life has been affected by living with a woman from another culture and another language, and he answered that it’s not my culture or language that’s affected him, since we live in Mexico and speak Spanish with each other, but rather my personal lifestyle, which is sometimes drastically different from his. The interesting thing is that our children have developed cultural traits from both of us – being extremely independent as American kids are urged to be, yet being extremely family-conscious, as Mexican kids are brought up to be.

The following opinions are those of our kids’ in response to questions about being in a bilingual family:

Fran, 25, lives in France, where she is soon to be married to her Parisian boyfriend. After 3 years of life in Paris, she is by now pretty much trilingual. When I asked her (in one of our weekend internet chats) if she feels like she’s losing her roots somehow, she said, “No, I’m finally beginning to understand my roots.” The language she speaks with her fiancé: “Mostly French, especially around other people, but when we’re alone we tend to speak English.” Does she see herself living permanently in France? “No, not permanently. But then, we haven’t talked about where we want to live permanently. I mean, who’s to say what will happen in the future?”

Lu, a 22-yr-old philosophy major, said in answer to a question about being bilingual, “it’s not so much a question of speaking 2 languages, but rather living in English and living in Spanish. The grammar and syntax of each language affect the way life is experienced. Spanish can be more abstract than English, but English is more practical and empirical. It gets confusing if I’m speaking one language in a certain situation where I realize that I could express myself better in the other language… On the other hand, when you’re bilingual, you have the option of seeing things 2 ways – backwards and forwards.”

At my incredulous “¿¿WHAT??”, he gave this example: “In English you could start describing something without naming it until the end, i.e. ‘the gigantic red ball’, whereas in Spanish, you name the thing first and then describe it: ‘la pelota gigantesca y roja’. So you conceptualize things differently, depending on the language you’re using.” (Did I mention that he’s majoring in Philosophy???)

With Anto, who is 19 and out of High School, I got quite a different view on the subject. When I asked him if I could interview him, his answer was: “Okay, but show me the green paper. I don’t do interviews for free.”
Anto considers Spanish his native language, explaining, “I only speak English because my mom hassles me so much.”

He said that he never spoke English until he was around 8. “Before, of course I could understand English but I didn’t speak it ‘cause I knew I didn’t sound good in it. It’s like being autistic… you know something’s there in your mind, but you don’t know how to use it.”

Did he ever rebel against speaking English? “Yeah, like when my mom made me tell her the plots of movies in English. It was frustrating because I think faster in Spanish.”

What about advantages? “Well, yeah, like getting out of English classes and exams. But sometimes it’s not so great. Like when you have to recite a poem in English in front of everyone. They all think you can do it because you’re supposedly bilingual, but you don’t feel so sure about that…”

As for advantages and disadvantages of the two languages: “With Spanish, you can express yourself more sentimentally. Spanish is a romantic language.”
And English? “I hate the way you don’t spell the words the way they’re pronounced. I much prefer reading in Spanish, but maybe if my mom had made me read and write in English every night when I was little, things would be different…”

Chloe, 14 and presently in Jr. High, said that she couldn’t remember when she started speaking English, but that the reason was “to speak to my mom’s family.” According to Chloe, “English is harder than Spanish. I can’t remember how to conjugate the verbs correctly every time.”

Does she read in both languages? “Yeah, my mom is always giving me books to read in English. Once we had this poem by Lord Byron in Spanish class. So I had to read the original poem out loud in English and another girl read it in Spanish. It was a poem comparing the night with a woman, really nice in both versions. I also read Harry Potter in Spanish and English, but I liked it better in English. Maybe because it was the original language… I don’t know… it was just ‘funner’ in English. So after that, I read Harry Potter 2, 3 and 4 in English.

Does anything bother her about being bilingual? “Yeah! It’s horrible – weird – when I have to speak in English with my mother around my friends. They think it’s cool, but I always feel really uncomfortable.”

How about the good side? “Well it’s nice to be good in English class, and in the future, it’ll be easier. I mean English is the most spoken language in the world – after Chinese – and Spanish is the third language. So if you speak English and Spanish, you’ve got a good start!

Until recently, our youngest son, Sam, 11, was still hiding in the bilingual closet! I was so tired of hearing him say things like: “This is Mexico. In Mexico, you speak Spanish!”, that I took him with me for a few months to English classes so he would have to express himself in English at least for a few hours a week!

As a final observation, I’d like to say that I agree with Tim, who pointed out at the end of our interview: “Throughout most of the world, being bilingual or trilingual is nothing exceptional. When you come to think of it, it’s actually odder to see a country today that is basically monolingual.”