Many immigrant parents see their children losing the language and culture of their homeland and try very hard to prevent it. My local newspaper ran a story about a woman from West Bengal, India, who started a Bengali language school for her children and the children of other Bengali-speaking immigrants.
Many immigrant parents see their children losing the language and culture of their homeland and try very hard to prevent it. My local newspaper ran a story about a woman from West Bengal, India, who started a Bengali language school for her children and the children of other Bengali-speaking immigrants.
Like many immigrants, Bagchi wants her children to understand their cultural background. To do that, she believes, they first must be fluent in Bengali, their parents’ native tongue and one of 15 languages spoken in India.... But learning a language isn’t easy if you study it for only a few hours each week. School, television and peer groups immerse children in English, and despite the best of efforts by both parents and children, it often is a challenge to become fluent in the parents’ language. “They dream in English. They do not dream in Bengali,” Bagchi said, describing Bengali children born in the United States.
They dream in English. It makes no difference whether the first language they learned from their parents was English or Bengali, English has become their “native language.” Joseph spoke nothing but Polish for the first seven and a half years of his life, but if he remains in the United States his “native language” will not be Polish. As an adult he will think in English, dream in English, do his arithmetic and his calculus in English. He may forget his Polish entirely.
Parents do not have to teach their children the language of their community; in fact—hard as it may be for you to accept this—they do not have to teach their children any language at all. The language lessons we give our infants and toddlers are a peculiarity of our culture. In parts of the world where people still live in traditional ways, no lessons are given and parents generally do very little conversing with their babies and toddlers—they consider learning the language the child’s job, not the parents’. According to psycholinguist Steven Pinker, mothers in many societies “do not speak to their prelinguistic children at all, except for occasional demands and rebukes. This is not unreasonable. After all, young children plainly can’t understand a word you say. So why waste your breath in soliloquies?” Compared to American toddlers, the two-year-olds in these societies appear retarded in their language development, but the end result is the same: all the children eventually become competent speakers of their language.
You are thinking, Yes, but even though the mother doesn’t speak to the baby, the baby hears her speaking to other people. True. But even this is unnecessary. There is an old story, told by the Greek historian Herodotus, of a king who wanted to find out what language children would speak if left to their own devices. He had a couple of babies reared in a lonely hut by a shepherd and gave instructions that no one was to talk to them or speak a word in their hearing. Two years later he visited the children and, the story goes, they ran up to him saying something that sounded like “bekos,” which is the word for bread in an ancient language called Phrygian. The king concluded that Phrygian must have been the world’s first language.
Would it shock you to learn that in the United States there are thousands of babies being reared like that? No, it is not an experiment. These are babies born to profoundly deaf couples. Most deaf people marry other deaf people, but more than 90 percent of the babies born to these couples have normal hearing. These babies miss out on some of the experiences we consider crucial to normal development. No one comes running when they scream in terror or in pain. No one encourages their coos and babbles or makes a big deal out of their “mamas” and “dadas.” Nowadays most deaf parents use sign language to communicate with their hearing children, but there was a period when the use of sign language was frowned upon, and during that period some deaf parents didn’t communicate with their young children at all, except in the most rudimentary ways. And yet, these children suffered no harm. Despite the fact that they didn’t learn any language at all from their parents, they became fluent speakers of English. Don’t ask them how they learned it; they can’t remember and many of them consider the question offensive. I assume they learned the same way Joseph did.
Socialization researchers are unlikely to study families in which the parents speak Polish or Bengali, much less families in which the parents communicate only in sign. They don’t worry about how and where children acquire their language because it is a constant: all the parents in their studies speak English and so do all the children, and the researchers assume that children must learn their language from their parents. They make the same assumption about other aspects of socialization. They are wrong about language and I believe they are wrong about other aspects of socialization. Bilingualism is simply the most conspicuous marker of context-specific socialization—socialization that is tied to a particular social context.
~~The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do -by- Judith Rich Harris
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