[精听口译素材] 38. 母语传承 Bilingual environments: Blessing or Curse?

Ladies and gentlemen, 

Of course, we all want, I think, to pass our mother tongue on to our children and this is an issue that's very relevant for many interpreters. It's not obvious for them because they live abroad, and they bring their children up in a foreign country. And very often, they have a partner who has a different mother tongue from themselves. 

It's also a very emotional issue because we all want to share our own experience as children with our own children, we all want to pass down some of our family and cultural identity to our children. And this identity is very often bound up with our mother tongue. So I guess it's relatively easy if your partner has the same mother tongue as you and you're both living abroad. So the home language would be your mother tongue. And in that case, you have a natural divide between the home language and the outside language. Although I imagine that even then once children start going to the local schools, they would tend to prefer to speak the local language because much of their daily experience and their worldview is coming to them through that language. 

But it's much harder, and I'm speaking from personal experience here, if only one parent speaks the foreign language, and if the home language is the local language. And that's what I discovered when my first son was born, because his father was French, we were living in France. And we'd always spoke French at home. Nonetheless, it seemed to me obvious that I would speak English to my child for all the reasons that I've mentioned previously. I think I really underestimated the difficulties because it did prove quite difficult. 

First of all, how as a single individual do you provide a child with a whole world of experience in a language all by yourself? I mean, of course, there was occasional input from family and friends who were visiting, but basically, it was all through me, and I found myself reading a very wide array of children's books to him and playing him a lot of tapes, which was nice, but it was a lot of work. And it was a big effort because it felt a bit unnatural being in a French-speaking environment. 

And then there's the issue of exclusion. It felt uncomfortable to me to speak English to my son when his father and paternal grandparents were there because they didn't really understand English very well so I didn't want to exclude them. And this was true also have other friends and even went out shopping, it felt a bit rude to be speaking to my small child in English in a French shop. And I found that I was having to restrict our talking in English to certain times and situations. 

And then as soon as he started nursery school, I encountered what was then a quite widespread hostility in the French education system to bilingualism. I think it's changed since, but the attitude at the time was that bilingualism was not good for children, it would slow down their educational development. 

I did persist it was hard work and I now have a second son and they both speak English to me, and they speak quite good English, but they're not native speakers of English, I would say. I think the outcomes vary considerably depending on, I guess, the children's personality, their relationship with the parent, the circumstances. So I'm not surprised to read that bilingualism doesn't survive into the third generation. In other words, I'm not expecting my grandchildren to speak to me in English. It's a shame because there are advantages to bilingualism. It's a very useful asset on the job market. But also apparently, it provides cognitive advantages. I've even read that you're less likely to get Alzheimer's if you're bi- or trilingual, but I guess that's not the reason that we go to such efforts to speak to our children in our mother tongue, it's much more an emotional choice than a rational choice. Thank you.