Trilingualism and Multilingualism: An Overview

Introduction

In the world today, with increasing globalisation, many more people move, work, live and marry across borders. More children are born to parents who, between them, speak two or three languages or even more. The European Union alone has 24 official languages, and in fact the number of official languages is growing not just in Europe but also in Asia, Africa, North and South America and Australia. This has created new forms of trilingualism and, with them, new linguistic and cultural challenges for parents who have different nationalities and native languages. When children grow up in circumstances where the people around them can speak three or more languages, their parents face a question that they may not be prepared for: how can the children be helped to make the most of the complex heritage of languages and cultures that are available to them? Most of us learn our strategies for parenting from our own parents. But parents who have themselves grown up in monolingual or even bilingual settings will have no ready models for trilingual parenting.

This book aims to help parents and professionals to tackle the specific challenges faced by trilingual families with children. Books on trilingualism and multilingualism tend to focus on young children. They address questions such as when and how children acquire three languages and in what circumstances they use them. Here, in addition, we will consider the position of the parents in trilingual families. They have received less attention, but their role is crucial. Their practices and decisions will determine how far the children benefit from the opportunities they have for becoming trilingual. We will report how some parents have responded to the challenge, and hope that this will provide a stimulus for readers to reflect on the situations they face.

Much of what has been written about trilingualism has drawn on concepts that were developed in the study of bilingualism. But, while there are some overlaps, the ways in which languages and cultural traditions interact in trilingual families are more complex. Because there are more languages involved, language maintenance is more difficult, and the situation as a whole is more challenging. So there is a growing demand for information and advice on trilingualism (and multilingualism more generally) from parents who feel that what they read and are told about bilingualism does not fully answer the questions they have about the development of their own children. This led many volunteers to take part in the research study on which this book is mainly based, a project carried out by Andreas, who interviewed parents and some teenagers in 35 trilingual families in England and 35 families in Germany (see the next section for more information). Our ultimate goal is to provide an account that will help other parents in trilingual families to review their options and make informed choices. Many parents will want to pass on all the languages in their repertoire to their children, but some will not. We will discuss the reasons that are given for different choices and enable readers to evaluate the options for themselves. Thus the book addresses four broad questions:

• How will parents' competence in their home languages and the community language influence their decision to use those languages with their children?

• What strategies do parents employ at home and outside in order to foster particular languages with their children?

• How are parents' choices influenced by their linguistic and cultural backgrounds?

• What impact do the beliefs and attitudes of members of the extended family and other people have on trilingual families' language practices?

Other issues that were frequently mentioned by parents and that we cover in the book include:

• uncertainty about when to introduce a third language to a child;

• being consistent about using particular languages at home and outside;

• mixing languages;

• developing a minority language;

• difficulties at school;

• children's sense of identity.

Our Sources

The main source for the book was Andreas's interviews conducted with parents in trilingual families living in England and Germany. Most participants could speak English, except some families in Germany where the interviews were conducted in German, which were translated by Andreas. The majority of these parents were in their 30s; their average age was about 38 years, although the youngest parent was 18 and the oldest 56. The parents had a total of 46 nationalities and spoke over 40 different native languages between them. The largest number had British or German nationality, but there were also significant numbers with Finnish, Russian, Italian, US-American and French nationality. While most came from a white European ethnic background, there was also a representation of a range of other ethnic minorities.

Questions were addressed to the parents together where both were available for the interview. Occasionally teenage children joined in the meeting and were asked some questions too. The children had an average age of around seven years, slightly older in England on average and slightly younger in Germany. Because the research concerned parents in trilingual families and the social and linguistic effects of their language use with their children when they are still living at home, young people in the families over the age of 15 years were not included in our discussions. All trilingual families had the potential of using at least three languages between the community and their home. The interviews with the parents established their general background and explored their language background and their use of languages in the home in detail. They also covered issues relating to cultural practices and cultural identity. These themes will be discussed in later chapters.

In addition to the interview study, we have also drawn on approximately 150 contributions to an internet forum about trilingualism that has been online for some years (www.trilingualism.org) and on more than 250 anonymous emails. (The names of all participants in this book have been changed, in order to protect their anonymity.) For example, Abelena, a Mexican mother living in England, said: 'I would love to participate in your survey, and in turn learn more about how to facilitate my son's acquisition of these languages'. Oliva, a US-American mother living in Germany, said: 'Please also keep me informed on the results of your study. I think that there is a big need for the study on trilingualism.' Thus the content of the book has been informed by an analysis of what parents had to say in research interviews, anonymous emails and contributions to the web forum in the light of the current literature. That analysis focused on how adults and children communicate in trilingual families, on the factors that influence parents' choices around the use of the languages available to them and on how three or more possible languages are used in different settings.

Terminology

This is a field where different writers often use the same term in quite different ways. This short paragraph lists some of the terms that appear frequently in this book. We are concerned with trilingual families, that is, families in which the parents are in a position to provide their children with two native home languages in addition to the community languag; thus, between community and home, three languages are available. In this book we employ the term community language to refer to the language that is spoken in the wider community and neighbourhood in which a trilingual family lives. The terms native language, heritage language and minority language are used interchangeably to refer to one, two or three of the parents' languages which they acquired as native languages in the society in which they were living when they were young (i.e. in their formative years). The term home languages refers to the parents' native languages as a unit. It can also include the community language if one or both parents speak it as a native language. The terms monolingual and bilingual are used to describe individuals who have one or two native languages. Multilingual and multilingualism are used as general terms for a situation in which speakers are not just bilingual but show a mastery of three or more languages.

Pinpointing Family Language Background

The first step for any parent reading this book is to identify the family's language background. This is because the language strategies that we employ and the ways in which we use our languages change depending on who speaks which languages in the family and how many languages they speak individually and collectively. For example, a parent who speaks only one native language has different concerns from a parent who speaks two or three native languages. In order clarify family background, we have developed a framework for categorising multilingual families into three groups. All of the parents who fit in this framework have the potential to bring up their children to speak three or more native languages, but how they might do it and what factors may influence them will vary according to their language backgrounds. Figure 1.1 presents a series of questions that helps to determine the 'type' of multilingual family.

Families in the first trilingual group comprise monolingual parents who live in a country where their native languages are not the community language. They speak different native languages, and neither of them learned as a child the community language of the country where they now live. This group is the subject of Chapter 3. Examples include:

• Gerd speaks German as his native language and Sade, his wife, speaks Finnish. Both moved to England as adults for educational purposes before they met. They married in England and are bringing up their children there. This has created the opportunity for their children to learn three languages.

• Pietro, who is in his 40s, grew up in Italy. He and his Iranian wife, Afareen, had been living together for 10 years when they moved to England because of their work situation. Pietro spoke Italian as his native language, while Afareen spoke Persian-Farsi. They now both speak English fluently, as do their children.

• Adrijana is a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian and her husband, Anatoly, speaks Russian. They live in the USA, where they speak their respective native languages with their 14-month-old daughter. The parents communicate in English with each other and they plan to start introducing some English to their child a year before she starts going to a nursery.

Families in the second group (see Chapter 4) have at least one bilingual parent. A number of different language constellations are possible. They include families where one parent speaks one native language and the other parent two native languages, and also families where both parents speak two native languages. These may include the community language. Sometimes both parents are bilingual with the same linguistic background, but neither of them speaks the community language as a native language. The result is that their two shared languages plus the community language create a trilingual background for their children. Examples include:

• Adelina and Axel live in Germany. She speaks Italian and English as her native languages, while he speaks the community language, German, as a native language.

• Odval and Chuluun live in Germany. They both grew up with the same two native languages, Russian and Mongolian. Both parents were already adults when they moved to the host country to study at a university, where they learnt the community language as an additional language. Thus, in addition to their two native languages, German was available to the family when the children were born.

• Tereixa and Alfonso, who are both bilingual in Galician and Spanish, live in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. As parents they speak Galician with each other. They are expecting a child in a few weeks' time. Tereixa plans to speak only Galician to the child, whereas Alfonso intends to use Spanish. The social environment outside the home will be French-speaking.

Family members in the third group (see Chapter 5) speak three languages between them. Often, one or both parents are trilingual, although there are a number of other possible language constellations. Examples include:

• Anne and Michael live in England. She speaks Finnish, Swedish and English as native languages, while he speaks only English. To their child they speak only English, neglecting the mother's other two native languages.

• Irena left Lithuania for Germany 10 years ago with her parents. Gvidas came from Lithuania two years later to study and work in Germany with the intention of staying. Some years later they met and married in Germany. They both speak Russian and Lithuanian as native languages. In addition, Irena speaks German on a native level too, because she acquired it in Germany when she was still a girl. Gvidas speaks Lithuanian and Irena Russian with their young child, while German is the language of the community. However, Gvidas finds it increasingly hard to use Lithuanian because relatives around mainly speak Russian or German with the child.

• Sheker speaks Kazak and Russian as well as German and English and her husband, Adamo, speaks Italian, Spanish and French. The parents are very unsure about which and how many languages to use with their child. Adamo thinks he should refrain from using Spanish and French and use only Italian with his child.

An outline of the Book

Each of the three main chapters focuses on one of these family groups. Some parents reading this book may wish to concentrate on the chapter that covers their specific language situation (as indicated from Figure 1.1). The chapters all cover four complementary themes:

• how parents decide to use languages with their children;

• languages at school;

• languages and the extended family;

• our languages and our cultures.

(a) How parents decide to use languages with their children

This is the fundamental issue that the book sets out to address. A key factor that influences language use is, of course, the language competence of the parents. That has been identified as the major reason for parents deciding whether or not to use a certain language with their children. There are exceptions. For example, some parents use a community language at home even though it is not their own preferred language, because they believe it will help their children to have a head start at school if they are exposed regularly to the language of the school in advance. With the same end in view, other parents employ a nanny who speaks the community language or enrol their children in nurseries at a very young age. Parents may alternatively adopt a deliberate strategy that is designed to enhance their children's command of their native languages rather than the community language. For example, they may each use one of their own native languages with the children in what is known as the OPOL method – One Parent One Language (also called One Person One Language). In the families briefly described in the previous section, Andrijana and Anatoly in Group 1, Tereixa and Alfonso in Group 2, and Irena and Gvidas in Group 3 were using the OPOL method when they were interviewed.

• In what ways may parents' language competence in the community language and in their native languages influence their family language practices?

• How useful is the OPOL method for different groups of trilingual families?

(b) Languages at school

This section of each chapter looks at the families' language practices in relation to their children's schooling. The settings that are examined include nurseries, preschools, primary schools, international schools and part-time supplementary schools. Parents are often very concerned about the effect that attendance at mainstream schools and nurseries may have on their children's use and maintenance of home languages. As soon as young children leave the 'safe' language environment of the home, they are liable to resort to the community language for vocabulary acquired at school which they would like to use at home. Some parents see this as an additional asset, while others emphasise the threat it poses to the children's use of their parents' native languages. Franciszek, a British/Polish father living in England, said:

Sometimes if you wanted to speak the home language [Polish] with the child, the child would refuse because all their friends were using English. That started since they started going to school, age of four to five.

Some commentators have highlighted a lack of balance, as the home languages of multilingual families are overpowered by the influence of the community language in the school context. The aim of this section in each chapter is to investigate the influence of nurseries and schools on the maintenance of home languages in trilingual families from different language backgrounds. We show how some parents choose educational establishments that will support their children's acquisition of either the community language or selected home languages.