Woman's Hour - Parenting: How do you bring up a multilingual child with a minority language?
Episode Date: December 4, 2019How do you raise multilingual children? And what happens when your first language isn't very common where you live? Language is one of the things that can help you stay connected to your heritage but ...raising a child to speak two or more languages can be harder than it sounds. We hear from two Nigerian mums: one who speaks Igala and the other Yoruba.
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Hello and welcome to Woman's Hour. I'm Andrea Catherwood.
You may well be bringing up your children to speak two languages or even more.
And if you're lucky, you'll have plenty of resources and family and friends around you who speak those languages.
But what if you're trying to bring up your kids to be multilingual when you are the only person from your background living in the area and your language isn't even taught in schools?
Well, two women who are coping with these challenges are Mercy Haruna,
who is presenter of podcast Parentland,
and Bimi Isimi, who is founder of Culture Tree,
and we'll explain a little bit about what that is in just a moment.
They're both in the studio with me now.
Welcome, both of you.
Mercy, you're from a Nigerian background
and you speak Igala as well as English. Correct. And you you. Marisi, you're from a Nigerian background and you speak
Igala as well as English and you grew up speaking that, right? Both of the languages. Now you've got
two small children, I think, and at what point did you decide that you wanted them to grow up
speaking both those languages? Well, I didn't have to decide English, clearly. Of course,
you live in Kent, so that's a given, right? And with Igala, it's just something that I wanted them to do
because it's the language that I speak with my family in Nigeria.
Yeah, it's their heritage.
Of course.
I mean, I think most people would understand that, you know,
you want your kids to speak essentially your mother tongue, right?
Bimi, you're also Nigerian,
and you actually grew up speaking a different Nigerian language.
Did you always assume that your kids would speak it as well?
No, I didn't because we live in London.
So I knew that there would be a challenge to get them to speak Yoruba,
which is the language that I speak.
It's a West African language from Nigeria.
So I always knew that being in London, it would be a challenge to do that.
And that's why I set up Culture Tree.
So tell me a little bit about it because, of course, you know,
in order for your child to grow up speaking that language, you need to be speaking Yoruba at home, I guess, all the time.
Yeah.
How hard is that to do?
The challenge is that, as you said previously, that there isn't, you're not in an environment where it's spoken.
So as for me, it's a case of I'm the only person, my husband and I are the only people who my child will learn Yoruba from.
So I need to create an environment
where she hears other people speaking that language.
And a lot of parents find
they have the same issue with trying to pass on a language
that they themselves don't actually speak.
So what you find is in London, a lot of second generation
Nigerians weren't encouraged
or weren't taught to speak Yoruba.
So growing up, they didn't speak it themselves.
Mercy, there's a lot of this, because I know this
amongst quite a lot of friends of mine
who've come from different places.
So your parents arrived, say, from Pakistan or from China or from Nigeria,
and they had a desire for you to fit in, right?
And they sort of thought the best thing they could do for their kids
was not teach them the language of their background.
Is that still a problem?
I think it's still a problem.
I think more and more, though, people are realising that teaching their children
these languages will keep them rooted and connected to their heritage.
And so it's changing slowly.
But, yeah, it's still an issue, I believe.
Bimi, you took a really proactive approach.
Tell us what you did.
I set up Culture Tree.
So what I did for my younger child is I started doing animations.
So we did Yoruba Nursery Rhymes and we put those on YouTube.
And it was really, did you find that they weren't there already?
No, they weren't.
That's why I set up because I looked for resources and content to teach my child
and I couldn't find any content.
And that's where we started doing the nursery rhymes
and we started doing stories and then we set up the classes as well for parents I was just echoing
what Mercy said there there is a change at a shift a lot of parents do want their kids to speak
um their mother tongue and have that connection to their roots um because there is things about
identity as well you have even though you're British you you are um you know Nigerian as well
and it's not just about the language, it's about the food,
the way we dress, the way we show respect to elders,
different things that you can identify to show who you are, really.
You live, Mercy, in Kent, as I said,
as opposed to living in London, which at least has got on,
you know, it's so multicultural.
There's people in London who can speak almost every language.
I'm sure if you can
have access to them and find them
a little bit more difficult where you are
how hard have you found it to actually
get your kids to speak
a Gala all the time?
Honestly it's been really difficult and I think
for me the harder
why it's harder is because my partner doesn't
speak the language and so
it's literally just me speaking by myself.
And I find it very unnatural to just speak the language alone.
So we do try to speak with my parents on FaceTime and things like that.
But it's not enough to get them to master the language.
And your parents aren't here?
No, they're in Nigeria.
No, because a lot of people say that the very best way to get their kids to speak another language is actually the grandparents.
That's how I learned.
Exactly.
And if you've got a German granny who doesn't speak any English and you really want to speak
to your grandmother, you know, you've got to learn, don't you?
That's how I learned Igala as well.
I mean, my mum was speaking English and Igala simultaneously, but then my grandma would
come over and she'd spend a lot of time with us and she didn't speak a word of English.
So I had no choice but to learn.
But they don't have that.
My kids don't have that now.
And I'm finding it actually very hard to speak as much as I thought I would.
It's just not coming as naturally as I thought it would.
And so unfortunately, they're not benefiting as much as I would love them to.
And I suppose some people do wonder or worry that if they're being taught, if they're kind of immersed in another language at home, that they will have problems perhaps when they go to school speaking English.
That just doesn't happen, right?
No, it's a misconception.
I mean, the child's brain is amazing.
It's a sponge.
You can learn.
I don't remember exactly how many languages, but a child definitely has the capacity to learn more languages than two.
So it won't be an issue if at home they're speaking one language
and everywhere else they're speaking English.
They'll have it. They'll have English.
And schools do actively actually promote that now.
Before, it used to be in the past where they would tell you
that you shouldn't mix the languages,
but now schools actively promote you being bilingual at home.
I think that was ignorance.
Yeah, Bimi, do you think that there was a thing,
I mean, another thing that perhaps it's a myth,
so I'm just going to put it out there and you can tell me,
is that when children are growing up speaking one or two or more languages,
they actually start to speak later.
Is that another myth?
No, that's not true at all.
Right.
That's not true at all.
Okay.
And it's actually been proven as well that that's not true.
See, I'm just going to read out an email that we've had in here.
It is from Tamara who says, my children were brought up
bilingual with Spanish and English.
My son's children are now
trilingual as his wife is Chinese.
The children speak Mandarin
at home with their mother and
amongst themselves and Spanish to their
dad and at school
and with me it's English. She
says that their reading and writing are excellent,
well above average,
and she feels that there's an advantage
in having more than one language.
Well, of course there is.
Because when you think about it,
you're using a lot of your brain.
We don't really use a lot of our brain,
but when you're speaking a different language to somebody else
and you have to have the intuition to speak to another person
in a different language,
you're actually very intelligent to be able to do that.
And are you struggling?
Marcy, you were talking about the to be able to do that. Are you struggling, you know,
Mercy, you were talking about the fact that it's very difficult at home.
Do you feel like, oh God, maybe
I should just give up? I mean, there are, I know quite a few
parents who have tried very hard at the beginning
and who it hasn't worked for long term.
I haven't given up yet.
I'm actually trying.
I think I'm going to start making some
materials just because it just doesn't exist.
And for me, speaks a bigger language than I speak. And so there's actually more resources.
She has more of a community in London that doesn't exist for me because my tribe is a lot smaller.
I don't know any other people around, unfortunately. So I'm going to have to be more conscious about um how I do and I think I'm going to have to teach them the way I would they would learn it at school which is
to you know print out flashcards and like you know take a real good hour in the day and say okay this
is what we're going to do right now just have to be a little bit more it's very difficult especially
when it's a minority language and like it's not a lot of people are speaking it but you have to be
proactive they have you have to be proactive about it have to be proactive about it, really. So, Bimi, tell me about that.
You set up Culture Tree, and actually you ended up with,
you started off by just putting these resources onto YouTube.
What happened after that?
After that, it went on TV.
It was on a channel on Sky TV.
And then I had a lot of requests from parents who wanted me to do classes.
So we started doing classes, face-to-face classes.
We now have online classes.
And these were the adults learning as well as the kids?
Yeah, so the adults wanted to learn as well as their kids.
So we do adult classes for young, like I said, second generation,
between the age of 20 upwards.
We have parents who come to our toddler classes with their kids.
And we have a centre in Peckham as well, a culture tree centre,
where we do the classes and we do arts and crafts.
It's not just about language, it's about the culture as well, as I said.
So, yeah, we do a lot of,
and we do Skype classes
because it's a lot of demand from international,
like all around the world, really, globally.
That's correct, yeah.
And are these quite a lot of people
who didn't learn to speak their own language
when they were growing up
and are now kind of regretting that they didn't?
Yes, yes, yes.
As you said, our parents,
when they emigrated,
you know, when you're in a different country,
you just want to assimilate
and you want to, you know,
so they were advised, as you said, not to speak two languages because they might speak later or they might have a Nigerian accent.
So a lot of people didn't do that.
But this generation have realised that, you know, there is an advantage to being bilingual or multilingual.
So a lot of people are making the effort to teach their kids now. Because the kind of cultural heritage and identity issues
come when you go back to Nigeria,
but then find that you actually can't communicate
with maybe wider friends and family.
Yeah.
There is an identity issue as well,
and it's a deeper issue here, especially here in London,
where we have a lot of young people who don't feel like they belong.
They're not quite British and they're not quite Nigerian
because they don't speak the language,
and they're not quite British because they feel like, obviously at language and they're not quite British because they they feel like they're obviously at home they're not in the way that we the food we eat the way you talk to your parents
the things that we do um so there is an identity issue there and I think that can be solved with
just having more done I don't I think it's a personal thing for parents but also maybe the
government can encourage it a little bit more as well, especially in schools. Marisa, you brought this up on your podcast, Parentland,
and you got a huge response to it, I know,
and not just from Nigerian families,
but from people all over the world,
and actually as well, you know,
from a lot of people who are living in England.
What were some of the concerns that they brought up
when they were trying to teach their kids to be multilingual?
Well, it was always an issue of getting them to have other people that they speak with
and not just the parents at home.
So it's things like having access to classes, materials online, books.
It's always very challenging, especially for minority languages. I think it's easier with languages like French or maybe Spanish. Yeah, books. It's always very challenging, especially for minority languages.
I think it's easier with languages like French or maybe Spanish.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, we've had an email here from Anika who says that it's really simple.
I don't know if it is really simple or not,
but they say just get one partner to speak one language
and the other one to speak English.
And their son is fluent in Greek with no effort.
So that's always good when you haven't had to make an effort.
But I do think that, again, that's another,
something else that we've heard quite a lot,
that one parent should only speak one language.
Is that a good idea, Bimi?
No, no, some people do practice that.
It's called OPOL, one person, one language.
And there's a lot of different methods that you could use,
and that is one of them.
But then that presumes that that parent is fluent in that language what we find with
non-european languages or people who are from the african descent is that we didn't actually learn
the language because we were we were born here in england so we only learned english growing up so
you can't teach something that you don't know yourself really right so our challenge our
challenge is different i just like to say that even when you were born in nigeria you still had
that challenge i have lots of cousins who grew up in the cities like Lagos or Abuja
who don't speak the languages just because they weren't immersed as much.
And, you know, because, for example, in Nigeria,
the lingua franca, the official language is English.
Most people will just speak English
because that's the way you communicate with the wider community.
There's a lot of languages in Nigeria as well.
There's so many, there's 500 different dialects or more.
So how do you communicate?
Well, Mercy Haruna from the Parentland
podcast and Bimi Isimi
from Culture Tree, thank you both
very much indeed for joining us.
We had lots more thoughts from you
on the subject. Coriander emailed
us to say, to add to this discussion
my son was born and brought up in Spain
until he was five. I'm English
and my husband's French so he had three languages. He struggled hugely and never fully got to grips
with any of the languages until we moved to the UK, where his English shot up and he promptly
lost almost all of his French and Spanish within two months. So it's just not quite as easy for
some people as it is for others. It did turn out that he was dyslexic and he did have slow processing,
which massively impacts our ability to learn languages.
She also says there were no resources available on multilingualism,
only bilingualism, and find it a real struggle.
Now, Augusta has emailed to say that I am Icelandic
and I've lived in the UK for 16 years.
I'm married to a British man and I've got two children. I've really struggled to keep the Icelandic and I've lived in the UK for 16 years. I'm married to a British man and I've got two children.
I've really struggled to keep the Icelandic alive.
And I do have people, family and friends in Iceland.
And they've been very judgmental.
And this has caused me tremendous guilt.
And Molly has emailed to say,
My father was a Welsh speaker.
My mother wasn't.
I was brought up in Liverpool.
I married a Scot.
And I've lived in Scotland for many years.
I met my only remaining Welsh-speaking cousin yesterday and I feel so sad and angry
that my parents did not bring me, my brother and my sister up to speak Welsh as well as English.
It's interesting, this subject really does bring up a lot of feelings and emotions
as well as some tips on how to try and bring your children up with
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