multilingualism essay

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Multilingualism: The language of sustainable development

In a world increasingly globalized, multilingualism is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Supported by mother tongue-based multilingual education, linguistic diversity brings a number of benefits to learners but also to society as a whole. Growing evidence suggests that multilingualism can effectively contribute to sustainable development and to peace, argues David Atchoarena

Since the year 2000, the world has been celebrating International Mother Language Day on 21 February. Linguistic diversity is an invaluable part of the heritage of humanity. About 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. Yet, 2,680 of them are in danger of disappearing, and many more are already gone.

In that context, offering education and learning opportunities in the mother tongue is essential to transmitting and preserving traditional knowledge and culture in a sustainable way. Children, youth and adults require learning opportunities that are relevant to their lives and needs. This also includes having access to an education in their own language. Evidence shows that such provision contributes to improving learning and developing confidence and self-esteem.

Yet a study shows that, in 2012, an estimated 40 per cent of the world population did not have access to an education in a language they spoke or understood. Monolingual education models have often contributed to reducing linguistic diversity and the use of local languages. While this is still the case today, over the years progress has been made and many countries now offer education in diverse languages, notably in early schooling, and also in adult education and learning, including in literacy programmes.

The latest information revealed in the UNESCO Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE 4) , released by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) in December 2019, provides a number of examples of national policies promoting multilingualism in and through adult education and literacy programmes.

Algeria, for instance, promotes multilingualism through literacy and adult education in both national and official languages. Eritrea reported efforts to promote basic education and skills training for adults using the learners’ mother tongue in literacy implementation.

In Mexico, the adult education policy focuses on literacy for the Spanish-speaking population and bilingual literacy for indigenous communities. A comprehensive monitoring strategy involved the development of 252 evaluation instruments available in several indigenous languages for different groups of learners (Maya, Mazateco Alta, Náhuatl de la Huasteca, Náhuatl Sierra Negra and Zongólica, Tseltal and Tsotsil). In parallel, additional tools were designed to assess the reading comprehension and written expression in Spanish and in the indigenous language of bilingual advisors in 8 states (Chiapas, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosí, Veracruz and Yucatán).

In Mozambique, the new Literacy and Adult Education Strategy introduces a comprehensive curriculum for youth and adult basic education and makes provision for programmes in six Mozambican languages, including Ronga, Changana, Sena, Ndau, Makua and Nyanja.

These examples illustrate the efforts made by a number of countries to promote the use of a diversity of languages, including indigenous ones, to expand access to adult education and literacy programmes, enhance the quality of learning and promote multilingualism. But what do we mean exactly when using the term multilingualism? What reality does it describe?

In fact, linguistic diversity is a dominant cultural feature in many parts of the world where several languages are used within the same communities or by different groups within the same country. In such contexts, multilingualism describes the use of more than one language in everyday life. A research study cited by SIL found that in Northern Pakistan, in some communities speaking the same language varieties, people reported that they spoke different languages. In other communities, where the languages being used were considered as being different, the people insisted that they were the same. Such findings show that the concept of multilingualism is complex and very much related to issues of identities, cultures and knowledge systems.

Recognizing both the importance of multilingualism and its complexity, UNESCO is  promoting Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE); it is an education that begins in the language that the learner speaks most fluently, and then gradually introduces other languages. This approach is key towards achieving equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all, as stipulated in the fourth United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4).

Recent neuro-scientific findings suggest that speaking several languages develops the brain. Hence, being actively multilingual actually changes a person’s brain structure in a way that improves memory, helps process information, and develops multitasking skills. In addition, speaking multiple languages could actually delay the effects of certain brain diseases causing a decrease in the ability to think and remember.

Besides its effects on academic performance and on learning, multilingualism is also often considered as a factor of peace. The experience of the European Union in promoting linguistic diversity and multilingualism, including through sophisticated and well-funded European education exchange programmes such as ERASMUS, probably provides the most advanced form of such a policy. Regional initiatives to build peace through education and multilingualism are also present in other parts of the world, notably in Africa, where cross-border African languages are being promoted.

Recognizing this trend, UNESCO has declared ‘Languages without borders’ as the theme for International Mother Language Day 2020. We at the organization firmly believe in the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity for sustainable development and peace. Last year UNESCO celebrated indigenous languages as a vehicle for peace-building and reconciliation on International Mother Language Day.

Multilingualism constitutes a powerful instrument to foster tolerance and respect for others; it creates an opening for dialogue. As François Cheng wrote in his 2002 book, Le Dialogue , ‘fate made that from a certain time in my life, I became the bearer of two languages, Chinese and French … It is not surprising that since then, in the heart of my linguistic adventure, which is directed towards the love for an adopted language, one theme has had pride of place: dialogue’ (quoted in ‘Languages matter’, the UNESCO Courier , Vol. 1, 2008, p. 10).

In an increasingly complex and multicultural world, marked by globalization and one of its most visible expression, international migration, dialogue is essential for finding peaceful and sustainable solutions. Hence, policies and practices recognizing and making use of linguistic diversity are key to assuring people in their own sense of identity while being able to understand and respect other cultures. By opening the dialogue between languages, multilingualism can establish a dialogue between people and be a promise of peace and a sustainable future.

David Atchoarena is Director of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning

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How Useful Is It to Be Multilingual?

Do you speak multiple languages? Are you learning a new one? How has that knowledge expanded your world?

By Nicole Daniels

Do you speak, read or write in more than one language? Has knowing multiple languages helped you understand words better — their meanings, associations, pronunciations or spellings?

Have you ever relied on your multilingualism to help you solve word games? The article you’re about to read refers to a New York Times game called Spelling Bee . The object of that game is to form as many words as you can using only a specific set of seven letters. Have you ever played? If you haven’t, give it a try. Do you think knowing multiple languages might benefit a player in this game?

In “ How My Multilingual Upbringing Helps Me Solve Spelling Bee ,” Lam Thuy Vo writes that her knowledge of Vietnamese, German, English and French gives her an edge in word games:

As a child born to Vietnamese immigrants in Germany, I was sometimes asked to translate documents into German, some of which were much more important than I had realized. Growing up in this kind of household also meant being somewhat linguistically agile. From an early age, I made acrobatic leaps between grammatically and tonally disparate languages without thinking much about it. “Con ơi, con có thể giúp mẹ với Steuerberater được không?” “My child, can you help me with the accounting?” my mother would ask me occasionally when I was in my teens. This type of sentence was not uncommon in my childhood home. If you look closely, one word, the German term for accountant, Steuerberater , is not like the others in this Vietnamese sentence. And yet it made perfect sense to my teenage self. This directly affects how I experience a game of Spelling Bee. When I started playing, I would sometimes find words from different languages. In the United States, one in five people speak a language other than English at home, according to the Census Bureau. That’s roughly 60 million people who seesaw between at least two languages. Experiencing the world in multiple languages has made me experiment with how I approach finding words in puzzles that were constructed by people who do not know the languages I do. (However, I’d love to one day solve a Spelling Bee written by a native speaker of Vietnamese, German and English who also dabbles in French.) Sometimes that means I’ll type a word in one of my languages that is familiar to me but that I’m not sure others know. For instance, the German words schadenfreude (pleasure derived from someone else’s troubles) and gesundheit (a response to a full-bodied achoo!) may have spread throughout English enough that they’d represent an acceptable answer for Spelling Bee. But dankeschön (a way to say thank you very much) is a word that I’ve heard some friends here use but that others may not be familiar with.

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

What is your reaction to the article? Can you relate to any of the ways that multilingualism has helped the writer? Can you think of benefits that she didn’t mention?

How important do you think it is for young people to learn a language other than English? How can language-learning be beneficial beyond playing word games?

Do you think there are disadvantages or challenges to being multilingual? Have you experienced any?

What languages can you speak, read or otherwise understand? How did you learn those languages? Was it at home, at school or from friends? How did it feel learning a new language? Did you struggle or resist? If so, how or why?

If you speak only one language, have you ever wanted to learn a second one? Why or why not?

In her final paragraph, Ms. Vo writes, “In an increasingly connected world, it shows that even if we lead individual lives, the cultures and words within them do mingle with our own.” Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

Want more writing prompts? You can find all of our questions in our Student Opinion column . Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate them into your classroom.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

What Is Multilingualism?

Definition and Examples

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• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Multilingualism is the ability of an individual speaker or a community of speakers to communicate effectively in three or more languages . Contrast with monolingualism , the ability to use only one language.

A person who can speak multiple languages is known as a polyglot or a multilingual .

The original language a person grows up speaking is known as their first language or mother tongue. Someone who is raised speaking two first languages or mother tongues is called a simultaneous bilingual. If they learn a second language later, they are called a sequential bilingual.

Examples and Observations

"Majesty, the Herr Direttore, he has removed uno balletto that would have occurred at this place." —Italian Kapellmeister Bonno in "Amadeus"

Multilingualism as the Norm

"We estimate that most of the human language users in the world speak more than one language, i.e. they are at least bilingual. In quantitative terms, then, monolingualism may be the exception and multilingualism the norm..." —Peter Auer and Li Wei

Bilingualism and Multilingualism

"Current research...begins by emphasizing the quantitative distinction between multilingualism and bilingualism and the greater complexity and diversity of the factors involved in acquisition and use where more than two languages are involved (Cenoz 2000; Hoffmann 2001a; Herdina and Jessner 2002). Thus, it is pointed out that not only do multilinguals have larger overall linguistic repertoires, but the range of the language situations in which multilinguals can participate, making appropriate language choices, is more extensive. Herdina & Jessner (2000b:93) refer to this capacity as 'the multilingual art of balancing communicative requirements with language resources.' This wider ability associated with the acquisition of more than two languages has also been argued to distinguish multilinguals in qualitative terms. One . . . qualitative distinction seems to lie in the area of strategies. Kemp (2007), for example, reports that multilingual learners' learning strategies differ from those of monolingual students learning their first foreign language." — Larissa Aronin and David Singleton

Are Americans Lazily Monolingual?

"The celebrated multilingualism of not just Europe but also the rest of the world may be exaggerated. The hand-wringing about America’s supposed linguistic weakness is often accompanied by the claim that monolinguals make up a small worldwide minority. The Oxford linguist Suzanne Romaine has claimed that bilingualism and multilingualism 'are a normal and unremarkable necessity of everyday life for the majority of the world’s population.'" — Michael Erard

New Multilingualisms

"[I]n paying attention to the language practices of young people in urban settings, we see new multilingualisms emerging, as the young people create meanings with their diverse linguistic repertoires. We see the young people (and their parents and teachers) using their eclectic array of linguistic resources to create, parody, play, contest, endorse, evaluate, challenge, tease, disrupt, bargain and otherwise negotiate their social worlds." — Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese

• Bleichenbacher, Lukas. "Multilingualism in the Movies." University of Zurich, 2007.
• Auer, Peter and Wei, Li. "Introduction: Multilingualism as a Problem? Monolingualism as a Problem?" Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication . Mouton de Gruyter, 2007, Berlin.
• Aronin, Larissa and Singleton, David. " Multilingualism" John Benjamins, 2012, Amersterdam.
• Erard, Michael. "Are We Really Monolingual?" The New York Times Sunday Review , January 14, 2012.
• Blackledge, Adrian and Creese, Angela. " Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective ." Continuum, 2010, London, New York.
• Definition and Examples of Bilingualism
• Majority Language
• Definition and Examples of Language Contact
• Definition and Examples of Native Languages
• Style-shifting (language)
• What Is a Second Language (L2)?
• Get the Definition of Mother Tongue Plus a Look at Top Languages
• New Englishes: Adapting the Language to Meet New Needs
• The "Inner Circle" of the English Language
• English As an Additional Language (EAL)
• What Does Language Planning Mean?
• English-only Movement
• Definition and Examples of a Lingua Franca
• Native Speaker - Definition and Examples in English
• An Introduction to Translation and Interpretation
• Metalanguage in Linguistics

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The Benefits of Multilingualism to the Personal and Professional Development of Residents of The US

Judith f. kroll.

University of California, Riverside

Paola E. Dussias

Pennsylvania State University

Paola E. Dussias (PhD, University of Arizona) is Professor of Spanish, Linguistics, and Psychology and Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

In the past two decades, new research on multilingualism has changed our understanding of the consequences of learning and using two or more languages for cognition, for the brain, and for success and well-being across the entire lifespan. Far from the stereotype that exposure to multiple languages in infancy complicates language and cognitive development, the new findings suggest that individuals benefit from that exposure, with greater openness to other languages and to new learning itself. At the other end of the lifespan, in old age, the active use of two or more languages appears to provide protection against cognitive decline. That protection is seen in healthy aging and most dramatically in compensating for the symptoms of pathology in those who develop dementia or are recovering from stroke. In this article we briefly review the most exciting of these new research developments and consider their implications.

Although most of the world is multilingual, the use of two or more languages in the United States has historically been marked as a complicating factor rather than a benefit. Attitudes toward languages other than English have been confounded with attitudes toward immigration and cultural diversity, resulting in a wealth of mythology surrounding language learning and language use. The assumption of English as the only language, or the majority language, in the United States has helped promote the belief that acquiring a second language as an adult is an impossible task that can be accomplished successfully only by the few who possess a special talent for language learning. Likewise, although young children appear to be able to acquire multiple languages easily, it has often been assumed that introducing a second language too early during infancy will produce confusion and cause irrevocable damage to the child’s language and cognitive development. It has also been suggested that language mixing or language switching among proficient speakers of two or more languages when they converse with others who are similarly proficient is a sign of pathology or incomplete language ability. These and other attitudes toward and views of multilingualism in the United States have affected not only public perceptions, but also those of educators and scientists.

However, accumulating data have shown that the assumptions and attitudes that have been prevalent historically are in fact myths: 1 Far from being a complication, research has shown that multilingualism provides benefits to individuals at all points along the lifespan, from the youngest infants and children, to young adults, and to older adults who may be facing cognitive decline ( Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012 ). Young babies are not confused by hearing two or more languages but develop the ability to discriminate among the languages they hear; they are more open to new language learning than their monolingually exposed counterparts ( Petitto et al., 2012 ). Adult learners who are well past early childhood have been shown to be able to acquire sensitivity to the grammar of a second language despite their age ( Morgan-Short, Steinhauer, Sanz, & Ullman, 2012 ). As for language mixing, code-switching is a common feature of bilingual discourse, is rule governed, and reflects a sophisticated cognitive strategy that enables listeners to exploit the features of bilingual speech as speech is produced ( Fricke, Kroll, & Dussias, 2016 ). Taken together, a growing set of research discoveries in the last two decades provides compelling evidence to reverse the older false beliefs about multilingualism. For language scientists, the multilingual speaker is now seen as a model for understanding the way that language experience shapes the mind and the brain ( Kroll, Dussias, Bice, & Perrotti, 2015 ). 2

How then does language experience shape the brain? First, studies have shown that the brain has far greater plasticity throughout the lifespan than previously understood. Life experience at all ages has consequences for cognition and for both the structure and function of the brain. As an important aspect of life experience, language use reveals these consequences ( Baum & Titone, 2014 ). Contrary to the view that the brain evolved to speak one language only, the evidence suggests that two or more languages coexist in the same brain networks, each language activating the other even when only one of the languages is in use. One might think that the engagement of all known languages would impose a terrible burden on bilingual and multilingual speakers; however, recent studies demonstrated that while there may be some small disadvantages with respect to speed, those disadvantages are far outweighed by what bilinguals and multilinguals learn about how to control potential competition across the two or more languages. Elsewhere, researchers have described the bilingual as a mental juggler, able to keep both languages in the air, as it were, and to simultaneously be able to use the intended language without making obvious mistakes ( Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski, & Valdes-Kroff, 2012 ). Recent studies have substantiated the claim that this ability to juggle all the languages in play creates consequences more generally for bilinguals and multilinguals that enhance the ability to ignore irrelevant information, to switch from one task to another, and to resolve conflict across different alternatives ( Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012 ). These consequences may be most apparent at the two ends of life, for the youngest babies and children and for the oldest speakers.

In addition, the observation that a second or third language engages the same underlying cognitive and neural machinery as the first language also has implications for language itself. The interactivity of the networks that support all of the known languages comes to affect the native language. The native language of a bilingual or multilingual speaker differs from the native language of a monolingual speaker, reflecting the influence of the second or third language on the first. What is remarkable is that these bidirectional influences can be seen at every level of language use, from the way speech is perceived and spoken to the way that grammar is processed and to the way one chooses words to describe perceptual experience ( Ameel, Storms, Malt, & Sloman, 2005 ; Dussias & Sagarra, 2007 ). An even more striking finding, in keeping with the claims about the plasticity of life experience, is that changes in the native language have been observed in second language learners at the earliest moments of new learning ( Bice & Kroll, 2015 ; Chang, 2013 ).

Because the native language of the bilingual is no longer like the native language of the monolingual speaker, it becomes easy to see that these changes to the native language may be seen as a negative consequence of new language learning or at the very least as an indication of language attrition. However, that view fails to account for the variation that is normally seen among monolingual speakers themselves. Most Americans accept the idea that people living in the South will speak with a different accent than people living in the Northeast or Midwest. These regional differences in dialect among monolingual speakers may in fact be related to the changes that are observed in the native language of bilingual or multilingual speakers: Not all monolinguals are the same, and recent studies have begun to identify the ways that monolingual speakers of the same native language may differ from one another ( Pakulak & Neville, 2010 ).

This growing body of evidence not only refutes some of the long-standing myths about multilingualism, but it also has implications for the contexts in which the benefits of multilingualism may best be realized. This article has two goals:

• It focuses on those groups who are most vulnerable and for whom the opportunities and protections afforded by multilingualism—and thus the overall benefits to society—may be greatest. These include young children, for whom the failure to acquire literacy skills may endanger academic outcomes, and older adults, facing normal cognitive decline as they age or pathology if they are likely to develop dementia.
• It proposes general directions for best practices in second language learning and offers recommendations about the types of investments that need to be made to overcome the myths and biases about multilingualism that prevent the full range of benefits to be observed for all Americans across the diverse contexts in which they find themselves.

Literacy and Academic Achievement in Young School-Age Children

One in five children in the United States lives in a household in which a language other than English is spoken ( U.S. Census Bureau, 2013 , n.p.). However, speaking a language other than English in the home is associated with a number of risk factors. The 2004 National Center for Education Statistics has reported that about 30% of children who speak English but who are exposed to another a language at home do not complete high school ( National Center for Education Statistics, 2004 , p. 9). Many studies have shown a well-established relationship between low socioeconomic status and low English skill level in children from homes where a language other than English is spoken ( Hoff, 2003 , 2006 ). Recent work has also suggested that speaking a language other than English at home acts as an independent risk factor ( Lonigan, Farver, Nakamoto, & Eppe, 2013 ). Poor literacy outcomes among a significant portion of the population constitute a substantial public health concern because low levels of literacy are associated with higher rates of incarceration, unemployment, and mental illness ( Chevalier & Feinstein, 2007 ). These facts are alarming and suggest that unless there is a marked improvement in the literacy skills of today’s minority children, the future labor force will have lower literacy skills than the labor force of today ( Murnane, Sawhill, & Snow, 2012 ). When considering this body of evidence, parents, educators, policy makers, and pediatricians unfortunately operate on the basis of a mix of folklore and intuition: Because mastery of English by immigrant children in the United States is a critical aim, one response has been to push aside the development of the home language to encourage the development of English. Furthermore, findings that bilingualism affects the rate at which each language is acquired ( Hoff & Place, 2012 ) have been misinterpreted by some as evidence that bilingualism provides an inadequate environment for the development of English language skills. However, quite to the contrary, research that has systematically examined early and concurrent acquisition of a home language and a majority language has suggested a number of positive linguistic, cognitive, and academic outcomes that have the potential for significant impact for both multilingual children and society. First, home language development is related to the quality of relationships within the family and to measures of psychosocial adjustment in adolescence ( Oh & Fuligni, 2010 ). Further, home language skill is important because in some linguistic domains (e.g., phonological awareness), skills acquired in one language support the acquisition of skills in the other language ( Barac & Bialystok, 2012 ; Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin 2003 ; Dickinson, McCabe, Clark-Chiarelli, & Wolf, 2004 ). Multilingualism is a significant economic asset for individuals, and a bilingual and biliterate workforce is a national asset.

In addition to the value that home language development brings to children via its role on family relations and positive outcomes to society, recent scientific findings have dispelled the belief that children are confused by dual language input ( Kovács & Mehler, 2009 ; Werker & Byers-Heinlein, 2008 ); more important, these findings demonstrate that bilingualism confers advantages in executive control—the brain’s functions that allows humans to carry out complex tasks such as solving problems, planning a sequence of activities, inhibiting information that has already been perceived, directing attention to achieve a goal, or monitoring performance. To illustrate how important executive control is, individuals who show damage in the brain areas that are responsible for coordinating executive function show impaired judgment, have difficulty with decision making, and have impaired intellectual abilities. A rapidly growing body of literature has indicated that bilingual children with abilities in psychomotor speed, general cognitive level, and socioeconomic status that are similar to those of monolingual children not only perform similarly to monolingual children on language tasks of grammatical knowledge and metalinguistic awareness, but also show a significant advantage on executive control tasks compared to monolingual children. Although bilingual children typically have lower receptive vocabulary than monolingual children, they outperform monolingual children in domains of cognitive function skill that require a high degree of attentional control ( Barac, Bialystok, Castro, & Sanchez, 2014 ). Another significant finding is that the benefits within the domain of executive control have been found across levels of socioeconomic status ( Engel de Abreu, Cruz-Santos, Touringo, Martin, & Bialystok, 2012 ). In this respect, bilingual language skill is relevant to academic success in children from dual-language homes because bilingualism is associated with an advantage in linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks ( Bialystok & Barac, 2012 ; Costa, Hernández, Costa-Faidella, & Sebastian-Gallés, 2009 ).

Interestingly, the advantages that are conferred by bilingualism have been reported for bilingual children even in the earliest months of life. When adults speak, bilingual infants look at adults’ mouths at an earlier age than do monolingual infants and for a longer period of time, providing the first evidence that bilingual babies “figure out” how to learn two dif-ferent languages as easily as monolingual infants learn one ( Pons, Bosch, & Lewkowicz, 2015 ). Furthermore, six-month-old babies growing up in a bilingual environment are better than monolingual babies at rapidly forming internal memory representations of novel visual stimuli ( Singh et al., 2014 ). By 11 months, the brains of bilingually exposed babies are not only sensitive to both languages but also show evidence of enhanced neural activity in those areas of the brain that are involved in executive function ( Ferjan Ramírez, Ramírez, Clarke, Taulu, & Kuhl, 2017 ), perhaps because learning two languages requires enhanced information processing efficiency compared to learning one language only, making it necessary for infants to develop enhanced skills to cope with the task of dual language acquisition.

One exciting result from the work exploring the effects of bilingualism in children growing up in poverty is that bilingual children from low-income families are better than monolingual matched controls on a number of verbal and nonverbal tasks (see Bialystok & Barac, 2012 ). Given that children in the United States who are born to the lowest-income families have a 43% chance of remaining in that income bracket ( Autor, Katz, & Kearney, 2008 ; Greenstone, Looney, Patashnik, & Yu, 2013 , p. 6), the development of bilingual language acquisition in children from language minority homes seems to provide a way to mitigate the academic risks that are associated with low socioeconomic status and to maximize school readiness. Like children who grow up in multilingual settings, monolingual children will also benefit from bilingual immersion programs because they too will experience the cognitive and linguistic advantages that are associated with growing up bilingual. Although the state of scientific knowledge is incomplete, a new and growing body of evidence strongly supports the benefits of maintaining the home languages and extending the transformative benefits of multilingualism to all learners.

Speaking Two or More Languages Protects Older Adults Against Cognitive Decline

Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich (R-GA) published an Op-Ed column in the New York Times on April 22, 2015, in which he urged the U.S. Congress to double the National Institutes of Health budget and specifically pointed out that a breakthrough discovery that might delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by five years would create a dramatic reduction in the number of afflicted Americans, with a corresponding reduction in health care costs and stress to family members ( Gingrich, 2015 ). What he failed to mention is that research on bilingualism has already documented a delay of four to five years in the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms for bilinguals relative to age and education matched monolinguals ( Bialystok, Craik, & Freedman, 2007 ; Perani et al., 2017 ). No known pharmaceutical agent has any effect that comes close to bilingualism. While bilingualism does not affect Alzheimer’s directly, research has shown that it does have an impact on the symptoms of the disease: Life as a bilingual seems to provide protection to the cognitive mechanisms that enable someone to negotiate the deleterious consequences of the disease, perhaps in the same way that previous, sustained physical exercise may help a person deal with an injury. When cognitive resources are stressed by the presence of pathology, a life of bilingualism may provide the same sort of protection.

As with the research with young children, some have questioned whether the finding that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia symptoms in those who will develop Alzheimer’s is seen only in adults who are relatively affluent and well educated. A recent study in India on a very large sample of patients who were diagnosed with dementia reported that there was a 4.5-year delay in the onset of symptoms for bilinguals relative to monolinguals. Most critically, the observed delay was independent of education, literacy, and other socioeconomic factors ( Alladi et al., 2013 , p. 1939). Other similar investigations have replicated the four- to five-year delay of dementia symptoms for bilinguals in different language contexts and for different language pairings ( Woumans et al., 2015 ).

Others have wondered about the extent to which bilingualism benefits older adults who are healthy and free of signs of cognitive pathology but who are undergoing normal cognitive aging, such as those who report gradually increasing word-finding difficulties in spoken language and increasing disruption to executive control ( Burke & Shafto, 2008 ; Campbell, Grady, Ng, & Hasher, 2012 ). Notably, the aspects of cognition that naturally decline in aging coincide with many of the features of executive function that have been reported to be influenced by bilingualism, such as the ability to ignore irrelevant information, resolve competition or conflict across alternative responses, and switch between tasks. Studies that have examined the performance of healthy older adults have shown that bilinguals often outperform monolinguals on these measures of executive function ( Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009 ). While the evidence on behavioral indexes of executive control is sometimes mixed, the findings from studies of structural and functional brain imaging provide compelling support for a difference in the brains of older bilinguals relative to monolinguals ( Gold, Kim, Johnson, Kryscio, & Smith, 2013 ; Li, Legault, & Litcofsky, 2014 ). When bilinguals and monolinguals solve a problem, they may recruit the same brain areas, but bilinguals appear to use them more efficiently.

Given the growing body of evidence that multilingualism has benefits for both normally aging and more challenged older adults, and since studies on young adult bilinguals have suggested that many of the same cognitive benefits can be seen for late bilinguals as for early bilinguals ( Bak, Vega-Mendoza, & Sorace, 2014 ), other studies have investigated whether a person needs to be bilingual from birth or whether late bilingualism can confer some of the same advantages as early bilingualism. Because age of acquisition and language proficiency are confounded—the longer a person has used a language, the more likely he or she is to be proficient, and proficiency seems to be more critical to these consequences of bilingualism than age of exposure per se—research has not yet provided a definitive answer. In addition, despite attempts to control or match as many factors as possible when comparing groups of people—for example, to examine the impact of bilingual or multilingual language experience apart from overall life experience—it is difficult to do this perfectly. Some individuals acquire a second or third language by choice and others as a consequence of the demands of immigration. Some live in an environment where everyone else speaks two or three languages, and others live in an environment that is strongly monolingual, like many locations in the United States. Thus, understanding how these different forms of language experience influence the observed consequences for the mind and the brain is a topic of ongoing research ( Green & Abutalebi, 2013 ). In theory, a solution to the problem of between-group variability is to conduct longitudinal research with the same individuals, although this is both expensive and difficult because attrition over time requires very large samples to come to clear conclusions. In one such recent study, researchers exploited a unique database in Scotland, the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, in which more than 1,000 individuals were given an intelligence test when they were 11 years old in 1947, and then tested again when they were in their 70s. A clear advantage was reported for bilinguals regardless of the age at which they became bilingual, supporting the findings from studies comparing bilingual and monolingual groups ( Bak, Nissan, Allerhand, & Deary, 2014 ).

What Conclusions Can Be Drawn for Language Learning?

The research cited above suggests that multilingualism provides exceptional consequences across the lifespan that reach far beyond the benefits of having two languages available for communicative purposes. Having two languages will of course enhance opportunities for social interaction, for economic advancement, and for increasing intercultural understanding. However, being bilingual or multilingual also changes the mind and the brain in ways that create resilience under conditions of stress and that counter some of the deleterious effects of poverty and disease. This new body of work on multilingualism has a number of implications for approaches to language learning.

Many years ago, François Grosjean published a paper with a title that garnered great attention, noting that the bilingual was not two monolinguals in one ( Grosjean, 1989 ). His comments were addressed to neurolinguists who interpreted mixed-language speech in bilingual patients as a sign of pathology. His point, reiterating what we have noted earlier in this article, was that language mixing and code-switching are typical features in bilingual speech and, for many bilinguals, mixing is neither rare nor pathological. However, the claim that bilinguals are not simply the addition of two separate monolingual language systems has implications that go beyond the observation of language mixing. Speaking two or more languages changes all languages that an individual knows and uses: There are bidirectional influences that have been demonstrated within a highly interactive language system. The features of the languages in play are likely to influence one another, and the neural plasticity that has been shown to characterize learners at all ages suggests that these changes can sometimes occur quickly during the earliest stages of new language learning. The bottom line is that the two or more languages that are spoken by a bilingual or multilingual individual are not like the native language spoken by a monolingual speaker. The model in past research on second language learning has focused on the goal of attaining native speaker–like abilities in processing the second language. That model assumes, for the most part, that the two languages are independent of one another, an assumption that researchers now know to be incorrect. If proficient multilinguals are not like monolingual native speakers, then the classic native language model is the wrong model for language learning.

A problem in adopting a multilingual model for new language learning is that for adult learners who are already proficient speakers of their native language, there are some features of the native language and indeed of their native language skill that may need to suffer interference, at least briefly, to enable the second language to become established. Research on memory and learning has suggested that what Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork at UCLA have called “desirable difficulties” may be essential to learning ( E. Bjork & R. Bjork, 2011 ): Conditions of learning that give rise to difficulties increase the contextual salience of new material, those that produce errors that provide meaningful feedback, and those that encourage elaboration may ultimately produce better learning and better memory for what has been learned. Desirable difficulties can be imposed externally during learning, e.g., by having learners acquire information under conditions that are costly or slow, or by mentally imposing those conditions on themselves, by self-regulation ( R. Bjork, Dunlosky, & Kornell, 2013 ). In the realm of language learning, the results of a few studies can be understood within this framework, but the implications for language learning more generally have yet to be developed ( R. Bjork & Kroll, 2015 ). This suggests, however, that learning new material quickly may produce a level of satisfaction for the learner but may not necessarily produce enduring memory for what has been learned. The lessons about multilingualism and desirable difficulties come together when one considers what is known about mixing languages. As noted earlier, code-switching, even within a single utterance, is a common occurrence in bilingual speech. Not all bilinguals code-switch, but those who do appear to move seamlessly from one language to the other with little disruption on the part of either the bilingual speaker or the bilingual listener. Likewise, studies of memory and learning have suggested that learning under mixed conditions may produce more stable outcomes than learning under blocked conditions (Birnbaum, Kornell, E. Bjork, & R. Bjork). In the field of education, the idea of “translanguaging” proposes a related concept about having learners exploit all known languages within the context of a given lesson ( García & Wei, 2013 ). Mixing information may not simplify learning, but creating learning environments that simultaneously create desirable difficulties and move new language learners in a direction that more closely resembles the experience of proficient bilinguals may be likely to enhance productive outcomes.

In addition, studies on infant learners have suggested that tremendous gains result when babies are exposed to language variation early in life. This body of work, which shows that bilinguals are better language learners than monolinguals, is not a surprise of course because bilinguals have learned something important about learning itself. One hypothesis about this finding is that the language learning benefit for bilinguals arises from enhancement to self-regulated processes. Bilinguals learn to control the languages not in use, and that control may produce benefits not only to executive function but also to learning mechanisms more generally. A recent proposal is that the very conditions that are available naturally during infancy may also give rise to learning strategies that may be applied to adult learners for whom entrenchment in existing knowledge may be an impediment to new learning ( Cochran, McDonald, & Parault, 1999 ; Wu, 2013 ). A number of investigators are now pursuing a program of research to ask whether new language learning training for older adults will produce benefits to counter age-related cognitive decline ( Antoniou, Gunasekera, & Wong, 2013 ). It will remain to be seen how effectively the lessons from each of these diverse areas of research will come together to provide concrete proposals for how new language learning might be implemented. The lessons from the field are clear in suggesting a new emphasis on exploiting a model that enables the learner to encounter complexity from the start and to then focus on the strategies that may encourage optimal self-regulation.

Addressing the Challenges to Multilingualism in the United States

As noted at the beginning of this article, the greatest challenges to multilingualism in the United States are characterized by the mythology about multilingualism. Learning a second or third language is not a cognitively unnatural task, nor does it create deleterious consequences at any point in the lifespan. The new research, especially work that has been made possible by the revolution in the neurosciences, shows that all the languages that an individual knows and uses are processed in an integrated language system in which there is extensive interaction ( Sigman, Peña, Goldin, & Ribeiro, 2014 ). That interaction across languages gives rise to competition across the known languages, which requires regulation. Although that requirement may impose an initial cost during learning, it appears to be the other side of a process that produces significant benefits for the development of cognitive control. The evidence on multilingualism leads researchers to think that new approaches to language learning that allow learners to experience the variation across the two or more languages, and that may produce language mixing and initial effortful processing, may be beneficial to long-term outcomes.

There is an inspiring message in a film called “Speaking in Tongues” that documents the experiences of children in dual-language classrooms who come from very different backgrounds, including both heritage speakers and monolingual English-speaking learners who have no exposure to other languages at home.3 2 The spirit of that documentary meshes well with the scientific evidence that has been reviewed here. Encouraging others to embrace this view will require social action that draws on cross-disciplinary sciences and engages a larger community in working toward that goal.

1 See http://www.bilingualism-matters.ppls.ed.ac.uk/ , the home of “Bilingualism Matters” at the University of Edinburgh, for additional background.

2 We note for the purpose of this discussion that we take a broad view of bilingualism and multilingualism, considering anyone who uses two or more languages actively to be bilingual or multilingual. The form of language experience will differ across individuals and in different language and cultural contexts. Those distinctions, the trajectory of language learning, and the resulting proficiency in each language will be critically important factors, but our interpretation of the available research is that bilingualism and multilingualism are more similar than different. The critical distinction will be between individuals who are monolingual and individuals who speak two or more languages.

3 See http://speakingintonguesfilm.info/ .

Contributor Information

Judith F. Kroll, University of California, Riverside.

Paola E. Dussias, Pennsylvania State University.

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2 (page 19) p. 19 The causes of multilingualism

• Published: May 2017
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How do languages spread and why do so many languages exist? Well-known agents of spread are war and colonization, but also migration and settlement, religion, the media, and the needs of trade and business. ‘The causes of multilingualism’ considers four conditions that serve to spread languages: introduction, sustainment, establishment, and benefit. Firstly, a language is introduced to another place by an event such as migration, natural disaster, or conquest. Secondly, the language is sustained so the language can be maintained. Thirdly, language shifts from being an additional language to establishing itself as the population’s mother tongue. Finally, learning the language is viewed as a social advantage and confers material opportunity, power, and resources.

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FEATURE: For winners of UN essay contest, multilingualism makes the world go ‘round

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Yet, these linguistic mavericks are among the 60 winners of an essay competition co-organized by the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) and ELS Educational Services, Inc. Their love of languages has brought them to New York, and their enthusiasm for global citizenship helps them bridge cultural divides.

The winners were chosen from among more than 4,000 students worldwide – from freshmen to doctoral candidates, majoring in fields as diverse as architecture and pharmacy – who participated in the “Many Languages, One World” contest. Today, they presented their essays at a Global Youth Forum in the General Assembly Hall at UN Headquarters.

Unlike a traditional essay competition where entrants write in their native language, participants in the UN Academic Impact contest were not only required to write in one of the six UN official languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish – but one that was not their mother tongue or the medium of instruction of their education.

“It's not just the acquired fluency in a foreign language that has astonished us in so many of the entries,” said Ramu Damodaran, Deputy Director of the Outreach Division and Chief of UNAI at the UN Department of Public Information, commenting on the outcome of the essay contest.

“[It is] the thoughtful and reasoned perspectives they bring, making elusive concepts almost colloquial,” he stressed.

To that end, one of the winners, Sandratrarivo Randriamanohisoamalala, a Malagasy student who attends university in China, told the UN News Centre : “For young people, multilingualism [is like a] passport is for travelers.”

Winners of the essay contest participate in youth forum at UN Headquarters. Photos: Jing Zhang

In her opinion, a person who can speak more than one language can have more fulfilling interactions and exchanges with people from different cultures. “Not only does multilingualism make people communicate better, it also helps bring something from your [experience] to share with others [so you are] not just stuck in one place,” she said.

Typically, a student who comes to China comes to learn Mandarin. However, Randriamanohisoamalala, who spoke Malagasy and French at home, picked up yet another language there: English. “When I’m in China, I have to use Chinese on a daily basis. But English is also commonly used on campus as the main language among foreign students.”

Nelson Mandela once said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language – that goes to his heart.”

Karim Ibrahim, another contest winner, would certainly agree. Born in Portugal to an Egyptian father and mother of South-African and Portuguese descent, he was brought up in France, attended school exchange in Hong Kong, and now studies in London. Ibrahim’s life is full of multilingual and multicultural flavors.

“In today’s globalized world, being multilingual enables us to negotiate with our counterparts less judgmentally and more cooperatively,” said Ibrahim, underscoring that multilingualism helps overcome prejudice and xenophobia.

“My experience has taught me to lift myself up beyond national borders and to better understand other parts of the world,” he said proudly.

"Multilingualism does much more than merely allow us to communicate with each other,” said Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information and Coordinator for Multilingualism at the UN, adding “it enriches our understanding of each other and the human experience.”

Chinese student Lin Zhao could not agree more. Lin did not choose Arabic when considering majors for university, but in her travels, she discovered she had an interest in both Arabic and Persian cultures and later decided to become a professor in Middle Eastern pre-modern history.

“Some people might think Islam is a strange religion [because] Muslims do not eat and drink during the day [during Ramadan],” said Lin. “But since I started learning Arabic, I now also have a better understanding of Islam. I found out that people fast because they want to know how poor people feel.” In her view, the more languages a person speaks, the more tolerance he or she will have for other cultures.

Mr. Launsky-Tieffenthal, an Austrian UN official who himself speaks English, French, German and Spanish, told the UN News Centre that he believes multilingualism “brings multiple perspectives to global issues and challenges. It preserves a diversity of languages and cultures. And it promotes unity in that diversity. In today's globalized world, multilingualism is more important than ever."

Today’s youth forum kicked off 16 months of planned events to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the United Nations. The world body’s Charter was signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945 and came into force four months later, on 24 October.

United Nations Academic Impact , launched by the Secretary-General in 2010, is a global initiative that aligns institutions of higher learning and research with the UN in actively supporting 10 universally accepted principles, including in the areas of peace and security, human rights and sustainable development. It currently has more than 1,000 members in some 120 countries.

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Multilingualism: An insufficient answer to sociolinguistic inequalities

Tracing the ways in which multilingualism has been understood and valued by scholars and beyond, Alexandre Duchêne shows how the work of sociolinguistics dramatically shifted the image of multilingual speakers and societies as a problem for nation-states to something to be celebrated, even as an indicator and contributor to social justice for minority language speakers. He then goes on to argue that this validation and recognition of multiple languages can divert attention away from broader inequalities, especially socioeconomic ones, that multilingualism is unable to address.

In her book Le bilinguisme en procès, cent ans d’errance (1840–1940) , Tabouret-Keller (2011) eloquently documents and analyzes how, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, intellectuals, politicians, and academics in Western Europe have contributed to the stigmatizing and pathologizing of bilingualism, bilingual speakers, and bilingual education. At first glance, what she describes is at odds with the current academic discourse, which questions the superiority of monolingualism over multilingualism and recognizes the study of multilingualism as a legitimate scholarly enterprise. This apparent historical shift in perspective, however, deserves further examination. I aim to pinpoint a series of issues that force us to reconsider and problematize what could generally be considered as a sociolinguistic achievement, and thus challenge the idea that promoting multilingualism constitutes de facto an appropriate sociolinguistic response to the pervasive and undeterred monolingual mindset the discipline has combatted from its earliest stages.

1 Achievements

Sociolinguistics has a long tradition of positioning linguistic diversity as a major constitutive factor in human conduct and social organization. By moving away from a monoglot conception of language and language use, sociolinguists have clearly challenged attitudes regarding the supremacy of standard languages, monolingual language policy, and monolingual ideologies. Instead, scholars have postulated – from various and sometimes conflicting perspectives – that variation, languages in contact, and multilingual repertoires form a very “normal” component of human interactions and societal practices.

By shifting the perspective, the field of sociolinguistics has made a substantial contribution to elevating multilingualism as a legitimate object of scholarly inquiry and a legitimate social practice in both the academic and the political sphere (whose agendas, as we know, often overlap). Sociolinguists have furthermore engaged in producing national language policies that acknowledge the multilingual aspects of a nation’s citizens. Some scholars have been influential in the field of education, providing guidance for bilingual programs or for heritage language classes. [1] Others have engaged in language revitalization processes by providing a multilingual approach to the matter (e. g. Hornberger 2009 ). For most of them, multilingualism promotes social justice, as they hold that injustice is located in the monolingual mindset (e. g. Clyne 2008 ). The importance of multilingualism studies in our field can also be measured by the proliferation of journals, handbooks, book series, research centers, and graduate programs on the subject. National and supranational entities (e. g. the European Commission, UNESCO, among others) have conducted large studies on multilingualism across the globe.

Far from being vilified, multilingualism is acknowledged and even celebrated, and academia has clearly contributed to this development. Many of the initial battles our predecessors fought in the belief that reclaiming multilingualism would lead to social justice and reduce inequality among speakers, citizens, and bodies appear to be paying off.

2 Complications

Nevertheless, this development deserves closer examination. As the “ Sociolinguistic Frontiers ” essay series (this issue) shows, knowledge production is inherently related to the particular moment in which it is produced. What initially appears to be a scholarly or political issue is deeply intertwined with our understanding of what we feel – or what we are taught to think – the problems of our time are.

As Monica Heller demonstrates in her insightful analysis of the SSRC’s Committee on Sociolinguistics (introductory essay in this issue), what seems possible to discuss and what seems impossible or less likely to be articulated is tied to a particular historical moment. For multilingualism, the turn from a stigmatized to valued disciplinary approach should thus be critically examined under the particular conditions in which our knowledge is produced. It seems to me that we should not be too quickly satisfied by the enthusiasm surrounding multilingualism, especially because this enthusiasm has concealed central problems that can no longer be ignored. In contemporary society, multilingualism is simultaneously valued in terms of “market expansion,” “productivity,” or “creativity,” and it is framed as a potential resource that can be transformed into various forms of capital. In this context, academic work is mobilized and instrumentalized to support this narrative. We see advertisements lauding the advantages of multilingualism popping up in the realm of private schools; we observe attempts to introduce processes of language commodification in the contemporary globalized economy; we encounter advocacy movements that mobilize multilingualism as a viable approach to creating respectful societies; we see supranational institutions promoting multilingualism as a central means to achieve global citizenship. These enthusiastic and optimistic discourses assume that promoting multilingualism, celebrating it, and valuing it as a skill, a talent, and a property will generate benefits for the individual, the company, the community, the state, and society at large.

These discourses, however, remain silent on the power relations and social conditions that shape the idea of multilingualism as a desirable good. They tacitly erase the fact that language (multilingualism included) constitutes a central site for the production of social differences. These differences are a factor in creating a social hierarchy of speakers, conferring to some individuals or groups the profit of distinction while depriving others of symbolic and material resources. Hence, multilingualism is not neutral, but rather intrinsically embedded in social processes that inform who and what counts as a legitimate speaker, language, and practice. As such, multilingualism represents a site of struggle for access to and distribution of knowledge, resources, and status. Indeed, what constitutes desirable multilingual competence, a desirable multilingual speaker, and desirable or less desirable languages (or combinations thereof) is part of the political economy of linguistic exchange; these highly variable factors are dependent on history, context, and the market within the capitalistic, patriarchal, and colonial logic in which we operate.

It is clear that not every speaker and not every multilingual repertoire has the same value everywhere and at all times. Having Japanese in their language repertoire may help a manager get a better job in a multinational company, and being a multilingual speaker of French, German, English, and Italian in Switzerland may ease a tourism worker’s entry into the job market. But being fluent in Portuguese and Spanish in the very same country does not necessarily constitute an advantage; on the contrary, this particular multilingual repertoire can be easily constructed as problematic – even as a deficit – since it also implies class and racial differences. Moreover, certain multilingual competences are capitalized on in daily practice but are not officially acknowledged. For instance, a hotel maid may be asked to translate an email from a Polish client into French. Her language skills are a resource for the hotel, but she receives neither compensation nor any kind of reward in exchange.

Under our current conditions, we, as scholars, are forced to question what it means when multilingualism becomes the object of such appropriation, what it does to whom, and what consequences it has for our academic stance. Regarding the latter, we must also reflect on how far we may be complicit in both the enthusiasm and the erasure it entails. I believe these questions are important, because answering them could shed light on why we have grown so enthusiastic about multilingualism and what this enthusiasm might have erased while also providing insight into how we could reconsider our stance.

3 Why recognition is not enough

A large part of the problem with the enthusiasm of sociolinguists for multilingualism and our hopes that it could remedy problems surrounding linguistic disadvantages is that we subscribe, more or less consciously, to the idea that acknowledgement of linguistic diversity will foster social progress. We rely predominantly on a vision of social justice that takes the form of a politics of recognition, to use the locution coined by the German political philosopher Axel Honneth. We believe (believed) that appropriate recognition would lead to fair redistribution. Nancy Fraser notes that the social, intellectual, and political mobilizations we are currently witnessing, as well as the theoretical and political contributions regarding social justice produced since the 1970s, are dominated by the idea that inequalities very much rely on “spoiled” identities and the solution is for social justice to act on them. [2] Fraser examines this trend by highlighting a series of issues. On the one hand, stressing recognition tends to erase the importance of redistribution, which was previously the key element in reading inequality and defining social justice. She furthermore points out how the emphasis on identity politics has supplanted questions of social class, emphasizing that an identity-based approach to social justice also induces/incites/encourages a form of competition among the identity groups, preventing logics of solidarity from forming. Although she in no way considers the politics of recognition to be entirely pointless or always inadequate, Fraser nevertheless proposes that we think in terms of a “perspectivist dualism” in the sense that it is necessary to think and act in terms of recognition and in terms of redistribution.

By adopting this dual perspective, Fraser once again positions the issue of political economy at the heart of social justice issues. This stance also allows her to challenge a certain psychological naivety found in our reasoning that the problem of social inequality would be solved by bringing recognition and legitimacy to “spoiled” identities. This approach reminds us of the importance of thinking in terms of intersectionality, as Black women intellectuals argued already at the end of the nineteenth century ( Guy-Sheftall 1995 ). This implies action and transformation regarding both recognition and redistribution while also breaking down barriers between identities and neutralizing potential competition between identity groups. Finally, Fraser proposes that social justice be conceived in terms of parity of participation. Without taking into consideration the structural and material inequalities of certain citizens, the recognition of their cultural diversity will, in the end, lead only to a simulacrum of participation. Without the guarantee of material conditions for actual participation, recognition alone simply gives a symbolic voice to subaltern bodies.

The field of multilingualism studies and its political impetus is linked to this general understanding of recognition as a form of social justice. By valuing and promoting multilingualism, by believing that celebrating it can neutralize inequalities, academics have created new hierarchies and omitted, for instance, the monolingual experiences of the working classes. We have forgotten that multilingualism is also an ideological regime that produces difference and potential inequality. The embrace of multilingualism by current societies also reveals that our stance can be aligned with capitalistic interests. Multilingualism can also be aligned with nationalist [3] and even (post)colonial and patriarchal interests, as Beatriz Lorente (2017) shows in regard to multilingual Filipino nannies. Hence, multilingualism is not per se emancipatory for all: it can also produce and reproduce exploitation and domination. Perhaps we have learned to love multilingualism and to ignore inequalities, to paraphrase Benn Michaels (2006) , even if we believed in good faith that we were contributing to positive social change. Indeed, by our very actions, we may have become complicit in the erasure of the complex processes at stake when it comes to language and equality. We may also have acted naïvely and at times irresponsibly by not fully taking into account the capitalistic, patriarchal, colonialist, and nationalist societies in which we operate.

But if this diagnosis is correct, the question remains: What do we do about it? One possible step is reclaiming redistribution both as a central concern – in order to better understand what is happening on the ground – and as a possible explanation for the dilemmas we scholars face and that certain members of society experience in their daily lives. In doing so, we would be obliged to resist the insistent and persistent siren song of the celebratory discourse on multilingualism. Another approach would be to analyze how this recognition-redistribution dynamic unfolds and how it enables – or prevents – the emergence of new intersectional solidarities in which language plays a role. We could explore, engage with, and participate in other imaginaries that fight and/or try to escape the current social order in which we operate. But we must give up the idea that multilingualism is a necessary part of the solution to problems surrounding language and inequality. And this in turn implies we must fundamentally reconsider what can be viewed as an achievement.

Baker, Colin & Wayne E. Wright. 2017. Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism . Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Search in Google Scholar

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Article note

This essay was originally published in Items: Insights from the Social Sciences , a publication of the Social Science Research Council. Duchêne, Alexandre. “Multilingualism: An Insufficient Answer to Sociolinguistic Inequalities.” In “Sociolinguistic Frontiers.” Series, Items: Insights from the Social Sciences . https://items.ssrc.org/sociolinguistic-frontiers/multilingualism-an-insufficient-answer-to-sociolinguistic-inequalities/ . Reprinted with permission. Part of the issues discussed here have benefited from the generous financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS Grant 100018_ 159852).

© 2020 Duchêne, published by De Gruyter

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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The cognitive benefits of being multilingual

Multilingualism has widely recognized social and career benefits. But did you know you can also reap the huge cognitive benefits of being multilingual?

Recent studies estimate that over half the world’s population is multilingual to some extent, speaking more than just one language. When a person is multilingual, they reap the social benefits of being able to communicate with and blend into a whole new community and culture of people.

But there are other significant benefits to speaking more than one language such as career benefits and, the subject of this article, the cognitive benefits of being multilingual. In fact, these benefits can positively and profoundly impact your cognition until well into old age! So, read on to discover some of the many cognitive benefits of being multilingual!

[And for a complete toolkit for how to teach yourself a language, check out the best ways to learn a language on your own .]

8 Demonstrated cognitive benefits of being multilingual

1. A better, innate understanding of how language works

Because learning a second (or third, or fourth) language brings your attention to the mechanics of the two languages, (including how they differ), multilingual people tend to understand things like grammar, conjugations, and sentence structure better than monolinguals. These people can more quickly pick up on the structure of any language and clearly understand how it can be used.

Multilingual people also tend to be more effective communicators, more exact editors, and more compelling writers, because they better understand how languages function, including in their native language.

Read: ' Why you should practice SPEAKING a second language '

2. Less mental decline in old age

Many studies have shown that the more elderly people "exercise" their brains every day, the less cognitive decline they experience overall. And it turns out that jumping between languages—or acquiring a new one—is a particularly effective way to attain this benefit!

Read: ' Learning a new language when you’re older and how to do it! '

In fact, several studies have demonstrated that bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by an average of five years! Even better, bilingual patients who do develop Alzheimer’s tend to display less decay in cognitive abilities than monolingual patients.

3. More efficient and better developed executive control in the brain

When you are multilingual, you constantly switch between languages without thinking about it. And this is why multilingual people tend to have better developed executive control systems, the part of the brain that controls your ability to switch your attention between things and exercise working memory. A more developed executive control system allows multilingual people to better perform tasks that require high-level thought, multitasking , and sustained attention.

Psssst! Check out Brainscape's flashcards for any foreign language to learn twice as efficiently as any other study method!

4. Greater cognitive flexibility and problem-solving skills

Learning a new language requires the brain to express similar thoughts in different ways and because of this multilingual people develop greater cognitive flexibility . This translates into other areas as improved creativity and problem-solving, as well as the ability to perceive situations in different ways. Multilingual people tend to solve complex problems in more creative ways than their monolingual peers, no matter what kind of problem is being solved.

5. Improvements in learning abilities

As mentioned earlier, multilingual people have more developed executive functions. One important executive function is inhibition, the ability to discard irrelevant or unimportant stimuli and focus on the key stimuli. Inhibition is key to learning new information and skills, as it allows you to focus on what's important while reducing interference from what you already know , as well as similar concepts. Since multilingual people have better-developed inhibition, studies demonstrate that they can not only learn a third or fourth language quicker, but can develop any learned skill faster.

6. Changes in neurological processing

Brain imaging techniques, such as fMRIs, have shown that multilingual brains tend to activate the linguistic portion of their brains even when not engaged in linguistic tasks. This leads researchers to believe that the brain’s ability to connect skills tends to enhance cognitive function over time . Bilingual brains tend to show higher level of activation to auditory stimuli overall, which gives them an advantage in sensory processing. Even the actual structure of the brain is affected.

Studies show that multilingual people have a higher density of grey matter in their brains, and older bilingual people usually have better-maintained white matter, even late in life. The cognitive control required to manage multiple languages seems to broadly impact neurological function and structure, fine-tuning cognitive control mechanisms and sensory processes.

7. More rational decision-making skills

A study done at the University of Chicago demonstrated that bilinguals tend to make more rational decisions. As language contains nuance and subtle implications in its vocabulary that can subconsciously influence your judgment, thinking in your native language tends to be fraught with emotional biases. Interestingly, though, multilingual people tend to be less affected by such biases, especially in their second language. Bilinguals are able to draw from their understanding of a problem using both languages, which allows them to rely more on analytic processes than emotional linguistic cues.

Read: How brain science can help you learn a language faster

8. A more perceptive understanding of the world

Multilingual people tend to be better at observing their environment and spotting misleading information. Perhaps this is because of their enhanced inhibition skills that allow them to focus on relevant information and edit out the rest. Due to this, multilingual people have been shown to be keen observers of the world around them, as well as more skilled at identifying and correctly analyzing the sub-context of a situation and interpreting the social environment. This makes multilingual people highly perceptive , a skill that's also exercised by interacting with the unfamiliar social or cultural context of a second language.

Multilingualism is great for your brain

As you can see, the cognitive benefits of multilingualism can potentially outweigh the concerted effort of learning a new language. This is especially true when you find an effective and simple way to develop your linguistic skills.

[See also: Should you learn a language? Maybe not (and that's ok) ]

If you're seriously thinking about learning a new language, you should check out Brainscape's groundbreaking spaced repetition system for learning a language , which makes learning a new language as efficient as possible for learners of any level.

If you are still monolingual or are simply ready to tackle your next language, check out the many foreign language flashcards we have, and get started today!

Bartolotti, J., & Marian, V. (2012). Language learning and control in monolinguals and bilinguals. Cognitive Science , 36 (6), 1129-1147. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1551-6709.2012.01243.x

Craik, F. I., Bialystok, E., & Freedman, M. (2010). Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease: Bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve. Neurology , 75 (19), 1726-1729. https://doi.org/10.1212/wnl.0b013e3181fc2a1c

Keysar, B., Hayakawa, S. L., & An, S. G. (2012). The foreign-language effect: Thinking in a foreign tongue reduces decision biases. Psychological Science , 23 (6), 661-668. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797611432178

Flashcards for serious learners .

Bilingualism and Multilingualism Essay

Language is the influential aspect which determines the peculiarities of the people’s interactions in society. It is possible to discuss the usage of language for communication from psychological, linguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives because language plays an enormous role in the formation of human identity.

The peculiar features of the social development influence the progress of the situation when today many people are considered as bilingual or multilingual.

Economical, political, cultural and social shifts to the development of international economy and integration caused the fact that the notions of bilingualism and multilingualism which are closely connected with the phenomenon of globalization became important aspects of a modern society.

To understand the peculiarities of this tendency, it is necessary to examine the definitions of bilingualism and multilingualism and determine the features in which these notions are similar or different.

The issue of defining such notions as bilingualism and multilingualism is widely discussed by many researchers nowadays. The main difference of their approaches is in the consideration of these notions as similar or different in relation to their major characteristics.

In her work, Pavlenko accentuates the fact that traditionally bilingualism and multilingualism are discussed as the same notions that is why she uses use the term ‘bilingualism’ in order to study the aspects of bi- and multilingualism with paying attention only to the number of languages used by a speaker (Pavlenko, 2006).

According to this idea, bilingualism should be defined as the phenomenon when people use two languages to realize their social interactions, and multilingualism is the phenomenon when people use more than two languages to complete their social needs (Altarriba & Heredia, 2008).

However, to discuss the aspects of bilingualism and multilingualism, it is necessary to focus on the factor of the social motivation and psychological peculiarities of the ability to use two or more languages for interactions. To discuss the notions as the same, it is necessary to state that bi/multilingualism is a complex phenomenon which is influenced by social and psychological factors and also affects the structure of the languages used.

This phenomenon is connected with the notion of codes. Thus, bilingualism is a result of “psycholinguistic functioning of the mind when having two codes” (Ceroz & Gorter, 2011, p. 357).

Nevertheless, it is also possible to notice that multilingualism is a result of using more than two language codes. The usage of two or more codes results in developing code-mixing and code-switching during the communication process (Ceroz & Gorter, 2011).

The peculiar features of code-mixing and code-switching are widely discussed by those researchers who support the opinion that bilingualism and multilingualism cannot be considered as the same notions. The base for their arguments is two views known as the ‘fractional’ view and ‘holistic’ view (Perani & Abutalebi, 2005).

According to the first perspective, a bilingual is a person who interacts as two monolinguals depending on definite circumstances (Altarriba & Heredia, 2008). The ‘holistic’ view is more general and states that the languages used are interdependent and influence each other. Thus, the person who uses them should be considered as a unique personality following definite sociolinguistic peculiarities.

Focusing on these two views, sociolinguists and psychologists accentuate that code- switching as the selection of definite linguistic elements in languages to use is more typical for bilinguals and code-mixing is more typical for multilingual persons who combine the elements of many languages in one speech to complete the conversation goal (Myers-Scotton, 2006).

Moreover, it is significant to pay attention to such points as the types of bi/multilingualism and their differences. Researchers define circumstantial bilingualism as the person’s usage of two languages according to the situation of communication and other socio-environmental factors which influenced the necessity to learn the second language (De Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2008).

Circumstantial multilingualism can develop on the base of previous bilingualism under the definite living circumstances. That is why it is almost impossible to determine any strict differences in these types.

Sequential bilingualism is based on the fact bilinguals develop some proficiency in their native language and then learn the second language. Thus, their knowledge about the native language can influence their acquiring the second language. The next stage after acquiring the second language can be multilingualism when a person studies languages sequentially.

Thus, there are no obvious differences in sequential bilingualism and sequential multilingualism. The only fact which can influence the peculiarities of multilingual persons’ interactions is the ability to learn languages more effectively with using the knowledge about the first two or more languages (Wei & Moyer, 2008).

Passive bi/multilingualism is characterized by a person’s knowing two or more languages, but active usage in communication of only one of them (Paradis & Navarro, 2003). Thus, the peculiarities of circumstantial, sequential, and passive bi/multilingualism cannot be considered as decisive for determining the differences in using the notions.

Those researchers who develop the idea that bilingualism and multilingualism are similar notions accentuate the fact of ‘soft boundaries’ between languages which are typical both for bilinguals and multilingual persons (Ceroz & Gorter, 2011).

Nevertheless, the other linguists argue that because of predominantly circumstantial character of bilingualism, ‘soft boundaries’ between languages are more typical for the multilingual practice (Myers-Scotton, 2006).

To determine the differences and similarities in the notions of bilingualism and multilingualism, it is possible to provide the general definition which is based on the opinion that a multilingual person differs from a bilingual only in the number of languages he knows. Moreover, multilingualism can also include the concept of bilingualism as the certain type of the phenomenon.

However, according to the ‘holistic’ view with focusing on such aspects as code-mixing and ‘soft boundaries’ between languages, it is possible to define a multilingual person as a man who uses more than two languages for realizing everyday social interactions.

The main peculiarities of multilingual persons is the effective usage of more than two languages as the combination of codes (code-mixing) in order to achieve the goal of communication in spite of environmental factors.

Multilingual persons differ from bilinguals in such aspects as the intensity of interdependence of the languages used, forming a unique personality from the psychological and sociolinguistic perspectives, and the usage of two or more languages and their combinations depending on their effectiveness according to the communicative goal.

Altarriba, J. & Heredia, R. R. (2008). An introduction to bilingualism: Principles and Processes . USA: Psychology Press.

Ceroz, J. & Gorter, D. (2011). Focus on multilingualism: A study of trilingual writing. The Modern Language Journal, 95 (iii), 356-369.

De Bot, K., Lowie, W., & Verspoor, M. (2007). A dynamic systems theory approach to second language acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10 , 7–21.

Myers-Scotton, C. (2006). Multiple voices . USA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Paradis, M. & Navarro, S. (2003). Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language, 30 , 371–393.

Pavlenko, A. (2006). Bilingual minds . USA: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Perani, D. & Abutalebi, J. (2005). Neural basis of first and second language processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15 , 202–206.

Wei, L. & Moyer, M. G. (2008). The Blackwell guide to research methods in bilingualism and multilingualism. USA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Promoting multilingual approaches in teaching and learning.

Multilingualism is good for us. Not only does speaking more than one language keep our brains healthy as we age, but it has multiple benefits for children too, such as giving them an academic advantage and improving their employment prospects once they leave school. Moreover, multilingualism gives us access to more than one culture and improves our understanding of our own cultures. 

But what does this mean for classroom teaching, especially in school contexts that equate English language proficiency with academic success? How can teachers harness the benefits of their students’ multilingualism, while simultaneously helping them to develop the academic language they need to succeed?

A team of Australia-based educational researchers has embraced this challenge by working with the British Council to produce a groundbreaking collection of multilingual classroom activities. These activities are aimed at teachers who work with English as a subject or use English as the medium of instruction in low-resource, multilingual classrooms. The team comprised researchers from the University of South Australia , Griffith and Macquarie Universities, all of whom have extensive experience of teaching in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, including sub-Saharan Africa, northern Africa and southeast Asia. Two team members explain what lies behind the publication.

For many years, teachers of English have been told that using student’s home languages in English lessons should be avoided at all costs

A growing body of research literature shows that drawing on students’ home language and cultural backgrounds in classroom teaching validates their identities and provides a strong foundation for additional language learning. Yet the reality for many multilingual students, especially English language learners, has been that their home languages are left at the classroom door or regarded as an obstacle to the development of the language of schooling and learning in general. For many years, teachers of English have been told that using student’s home languages in English lessons should be avoided at all costs. 

Language as a resource 

Multilingual classrooms are a growing phenomenon around the world, as a result of rapid increases in global mobility and migration. Within these classrooms, students may have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, may speak one language at home and another language at school, or be learning the language of instruction as an additional language. International agencies such as UNICEF, UNESCO and the European Commission contend that multilingual education can play a significant role in engaging diverse learners. As well as supporting academic success, classrooms that promote multilingualism can foster positive identities associated with their home cultures. This position is supported by Richard Ruiz’s notion of “ language as a resource ” (1984) which advocates for the use of students’ home languages as resources for learning and teaching. In practice, a language-as-resource perspective implies that teachers should use students’ home languages as a tool for thinking and communication while simultaneously learning and developing proficiency in the language of instruction. Nevertheless, English still overwhelmingly dominates lessons in many classrooms throughout the world where students read, write, listen and speak only in English. Despite considerable research pointing to the importance and benefits of incorporating multilingual pedagogies into classroom practice, there are few materials available to educators that explain how this can be done deliberately and systematically in lesson planning and lesson delivery.

Signs of change 

Happily, in recent years, publications, conferences and professional development materials have advanced thinking about the medium of instruction and ways to approach teaching that challenge the “national/official language-only” view.

Using multilingual approaches: Moving from theory to practice

A new British Council publication,  Using multilingual approaches: Moving from theory to practice , reflects the growing body of research evidence showing that preventing learners from using their home languages in the English language classroom not only impedes learning and denies their linguistic human rights, but also loses valuable opportunities for teachers to draw on their students’ knowledge and experience as resources for teaching. This collection of activities was developed in response to the British Council’s conscious decision to promote multilingual approaches to teaching English internationally. The activities are designed to acknowledge learners’ home languages and cultures when teaching English as an additional or foreign language or using English as the medium of instruction in multilingual classrooms. The activities are grounded in research-based pedagogic principles, briefly outlined below.

Funds of knowledge in the language classroom

It has long been recognised that one of the key characteristics of high-quality teaching is the ability of teachers to engage students’ prior understandings and experiences and background knowledge. This prior knowledge is encoded in their home languages, and therefore it is vital that teachers facilitate the transfer of both concepts and skills from students’ home languages to English. 

This view of language is complemented by Luis Moll’s notion of ‘ funds of knowledge (1992), which refers to the rich bodies of cultural knowledge that exist within students’ households and communities. Moll argues that when teachers tap into this type of knowledge by building relationships with their students and their wider social networks, they allow for meaningful learning opportunities. Teaching practices that tap into multilingual ways of reading, writing and speaking allow students to access the cultural resources that enhance the personal significance of their classroom work, as well as expanding access to knowledge through texts in more than one language.

Purposeful translanguaging

One of the most successful approaches to bilingual teaching and learning has been the purposeful and simultaneous use of two languages in the same classroom, a process that is referred to as translanguaging. The activities in this collection break new ground in being designed to enable teachers to constantly draw on and make use of students’ emergent bilingual skills. The activities are designed in a planned and purposeful way to encourage students draw on the most appropriate linguistic resources they have, allowing teachers to design intercultural and inclusive lessons that support English language learning but also draw on learners first languages and their community and family funds of knowledge. 

The activities were workshopped with and piloted by teachers in India, who applied them to their own classrooms and provided rich feedback and valuable ideas. This short film explains more about the process and rationale behind the resource.

Project leader, Associate Professor Kathleen Heugh sums up the social significance of the project in her observation that: “Forbidding a child to use his/her language is a violation of their rights, and deeply problematic for their future. We cannot afford to have students marginalized, feeling lost and falling out of the school system. Using students’ home languages, bringing in their own knowledge systems to the classroom should be the most important aspect of any school language policy”. 

Luis C. Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff and Norma Gonzalez (1992) Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms , Theory Into Practice, 31:2, 132-141.

Richard Ruíz (1984) Orientations in Language Planning , NABE Journal, 8:2, 15-34.  

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Free Essay About Multilingualism

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Communication , Community , Skills , World , Linguistics , Bilingualism , Language , People

Published: 03/26/2020

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Multilingualism has manifested itself throughout the world. The most interesting thing about this state of affairs is that it is inevitable because of the increased levels of human interaction across all cultures and language groupings in the world. This has led many monolingual societies accommodate other languages and learn them in order to communicate and interact with other members who do not belong to their language group. This has therefore made bilingualism become very important in our societies. It is interesting to learn that knowing two languages helps improve communication. In the case of a group of people knowing two or more languages, the use of the known languages when used interchangeably can enhance communication. in the advent of using code switching, can help people express themselves adequately in order for the listeners to understand them better. One thing that is puzzling even with the advantages that come with bilingualism is the notion of proficiency. Lack of it can make some people feel intimidated and therefore want to avoid the language they are not proficient. When people have not reached the native like proficiency, they tend to use the language they are proficient in and this does not give room for the other language to be used. This is the point at which code switching happens most of the time. Bilingual/ multilingual persons engage in code switching so as to express themselves adequately. David Crystal says that code switching is used to fill in for the deficiency that one may have in one language (365). This again helps bring out the attitude and relationship between the speaker and listener. This is so because people would rather code switch when they speak to close confidants, family and colleagues and not their bosses even when they speak the same languages.

Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. 2nd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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