What Do We Know about Bilingual Families?

In this chapter we briefly examine the important academic work that has been published on bilingual and multilingual families over the last hundred years. There are some fascinating studies on the interaction of children being brought up with two languages. The majority of academic studies describe the language development of a first-born or only child. Why has research on bilingualism only focused on one child? Has any research been done on bilingual and multilingual siblings? A small number of studies followed bilingual sibling language patterns and were typically conducted by bilingual linguists or researchers describing their own children. Werner Leopold, Alvino Fantini, George Saunders, Traute Taeschner, Charlotte Hoffmann, Harriet Jisa, Stephen Caldas and Madalena Cruz-Ferreira dedicated their time to transcribing the language use of their children.

Complementing the diary studies were several respected academic researchers working from different perspectives. From a sociolinguistic point of view, Christine Helot, Masayo Yamamoto and Susanne Döpke observed bilingual families in Ireland, Japan and Australia. Education specialists, Eve Gregory and Victoria Obied, tracked the literacy patterns and language use of bilingual siblings in London and Portugal. Books aimed at parents and educators, which discussed sibling relationships, were authored by Colin Baker, Una Cunningham-Andersson, Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa, Edith Harding and Philip Riley, Kendall King and Alison Mackay and Barbara Zuer-Pearson.

THE LACK OF SIBLING SETS IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH

When I began reading studies of bilingual children, one of the first things I noticed was that they usually deal with only one child. Typically, biographical or case studies document the speech patterns of a first-born or only child, usually under the age of five. Annick de Houwer, Margaret Deucher, Elizabeth Lanza and Susanne Döpke are highly respected researchers who focused on one child in a home environment and revealed their early bilingual development. Researchers have their reasons for only focusing on one child. In the early days, they had to write each word phonetically, making the process very lengthy. Transcribing a child's actual words into text is still a long process, even though we now have the possibility to record or video a child, which gives us the chance to rewind and check exactly what they said. If you try to write down just 10 minutes of a young child's conversation you will soon find that you are scribbling fast, making abbreviations and often missing parts of a sentence. When recording a child at home a researcher also needs to know who the child is talking to, what the child is talking about, and explain any specific references to family or friends. So we can understand why the researchers preferred that another sibling was not around to interrupt their dialogue, change the language or the subject of the conversation. It also explains why much of the research is on young preschool children, who are usually two or three years old, and have a limited vocabulary or lower word counts. It is also much harder to record the conversations of children talking to other children, with their fast-paced chat, playground slang, jokes and expressions that only they understand. Siblings can be even more idiosyncratic, with made-up words, songs, stories, or even occasionally with twins, made-up languages that they use together. To untangle such fast communication for analysis is a challenge.

University-based large-scale linguistic and psychological tests were also conducted from the 1960s onwards with bilingual children. The research was conducted in scientific laboratories with carefully selected children, observing a child in isolation from their siblings. Researchers tested a child's knowledge of grammar and vocabulary in one or both languages and their ability to switch from language to language. The tests were controlled with a group of children of the same age or similar language ability who were specifically chosen for comparison. Each child received the same test and their results were compared and analyzed for common errors or reactions. Including a sibling in tests would skew the results, simply because they are younger or older (unless it was an identical twin). A sibling might not have the same intellectual abilities, for example, four-year-olds make mistakes with verb endings or irregular verbs saying 'I goed to school' instead of 'I went to school' and it would not be fair to compare a seven-year-old with a five-year-old sibling. Thus, researchers tend to use a homogenous selection of children for study in a laboratory. The chances of finding 20 children with siblings of the same age, gender and educational level would be low. Therefore, what we know about siblings generally comes from parent-linguist's reports or from selected case studies on two or three children in the same family.

PARENT RESEARCHERS AND DIARY DATA

There are several detailed diaries or journals of individual children written by parents who are academic researchers in the field of linguistics. One of the first biographical works was compiled by linguist Jules Ronjat (1913) on his bilingual son Louis and the linguist Werner Leopold began a four-volume series of books on his first-born daughter, Hildegard in the 1940s. These case studies often span 10 or more years, from first words up to primary education, or in some cases through the teenage years. Werner Leopold, Alvino Fantini, George Saunders, Traute Taeschner, Charlotte Hoffmann, Harriet Jisa, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira and Stephen Caldas have all recorded authentic child speech in their own homes, with two or more children. Their observations give us an insight into bilingual child development. In this chapter, I will give you a brief summary of these eight real-life bilingual family stories, which are accessible to read via a good university linguistics library.

The Leopold family: Hildegard and her papa

One of the earliest records of child speech was by the famous linguist Werner Leopold (Speech Development of a Bilingual Child: A Linguist's Record, 1939–1949). While working at Northwestern University in America he spent almost 20 years tracing the language development of his English/German bilingual daughter's speech patterns. Born in 1930, Hildegard grew up in America with second-generation German heritage parents. The Leopold family followed the OPOL strategy,...