The Dreaded Lurgy & The Bilingual Child

This house resembles a fever hospital at the moment. It all started last Sunday evening when it became apparent that my youngest had chicken pox. Not that she seemed particularly ill or even much put out by it, and it has developed into one of the mildest cases of the disease I can recall.

Fast forward to this morning, however, and four of us are now laid low with Non-Specific Seasonal Lurgy, NSSL. Symptoms include low fever, headache and general lassitude. Too ill, in fact, to really want to do anything much, but not ill enough to not feel guilty about being lazy.

Only my eldest daughter has so far escaped infection with whatever noxious agent is causing the malaise, though this might in part be due to her morale being boosted by last night’s parent’s evening, which she attended with us.

The more familiar I become with her college, the more I like it. Her teachers are just so nice and enthusiastic it’s almost disturbing. And they seem to like her, which is good.

Their criticisms were measured and constructive and their praise thoughtful. Amongst them, her English teacher tried once again to explain to her just how valuable it can be to be a true bilingual.

A true bilingual is someone whose brain contains two separated language centres, one for each language. The recipe for creating such a thing is quite straightforward. Firstly, it must be started early: once a child passes the age of six or seven years the way the brain processes new information changes.

Introduce a second language after this and it will be stored alongside the Mother tongue in a single language centre. Although a child may become extremely fluent in the second language, they will always be translating, albeit very rapidly and without a great deal of conscious thought, if any at all. They may also have difficultly completely losing the accent of their Mother tongue.

Exposure to the second language needs to take up a minimum of 30% of a child’s waking hours, so sending them to school is a simple way to achieve this and has the added benefit of getting them out and about.

The major benefit of being a true bilingual is in retention of the second language: it becomes hard-wired into the brain and cannot easily be lost: older linguists lack this felicity.

In principle, it is possible to create a child who is trilingual, though in practice this is very rare.

Some people seem to see the creation of a bilingual child as being a raison d’être, the main motivation for moving to another country. Personally, I see it as being a nice-to-have, but not the main event.

But there is no doubting its value as an ability. Although people get very excited about computer translation, it is pretty clear that the utility of this is going to be limited for a long time. For a start you need some pretty good linguists just to deal with the idiomatic use that is common to all languages, something that is clearly lacking in current programes. For example, the English idiom “She’s a bit under the weather” would be best expressed by the French idiom “Elle n’est pas dans son assiette,” but run either of those through an online translator and you will probably get gibberish.

Secondly, it will take some pretty impressive software to deal with nuance and non-verbal clues. I’m sure it will happen one day, but I doubt it is imminent.

Which should mean that my offspring have already gained a useful qualification. Not a guarantee of work, of course, since having an individual skill is not the same as having the aptitude to do a particular job, but worthwhile nonetheless.

For the time being, however, they use their skill mostly for translating dirty jokes and rude songs.