Keep your mother tongue alive

Do you speak languages or dialects other than English? If yes, use your mother tongue whenever you can with your child.

Because language is the key to open the doors of success in our globalized world, knowing more than one language means that you have a special access card!

Growing up with an English-speaking father and a Chinese-speaking mother, my siblings and I were bilingual from the start. We’d chat with our father in English and automatically switched to Hokkien when we turned to our mother.

Since we lived a few years with my Cantonese-speaking cousins in my grandmother’s house, we picked up a second dialect. Needless to say, I have no problem getting around places like Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong or Shen Zhen.

Furthermore, I’ve found Cantonese incredibly useful in my current adventure of learning Mandarin Chinese (or Putonghua) due to some similarities in tones and word forms…

When I took up German as a foreign language in the university, Bahasa Malaysia helped a lot as both languages are straightforward and pronounced as they appear – unlike English, which can be quite confusing sometimes with its silent “h”, “b”, “p” or other variations in pronunciation.

During my years as an English teacher, I met parents who only spoke English to their children, with the aim of enhancing their language proficiency. Sadly, these children from bilingual backgrounds grew up monolingual and were actually quite indignant their parents didn’t speak

If you’re one of these parents, consider the findings of this University of British Columbia study reported in the Reader’s Digest (Jan 2008),

“Babies growing up in bilingual environments maintain the inborn ability to use visual cues to distinguish between – and learn – multiple languages. Older infants exposed to only one language no longer need this ability, so their sensitivity to visual information declines.”

In other words, exposure to multiple languages at home mean that children learn to “multi-task” as they learn the language. Th multi-tasking ability from using more than one language actually helps them learn a third or even fourth language!

For instance, my former supervisor, an Argentinian who speaks English, Spanish and French said that he could communicate with Brazilians and Portuguese with relative ease because he found similarities between Portuguese and Spanish word forms.

Being multilingual also means that you can appreciate the books, culture (TV, movies, music, dance etc) and history of the languages that you know. For instance, I’m quite familiar with Western literature, history and culture at the same time I am exposed to Chinese food, festivals and customs.

Although I cannot read or write in Chinese, I’ve seen enough Chinese movies, heard enough Chinese music and read Chinese literature (translated in English) to not make me an alien in the Chinese community.

In fact, I can identify obvious or subtle nuances of meaning lost in translation when I read “foreign” literature (or watch movies) in English.

“Soft skills” like these are extremely important when you work in a multicultural environment especially in “high context” cultures like Chinese, Malay, Indian, Hispanic and Japanese where “how you say it” mean more than “what you say”.

If you’re not into enhancing the communicative skills of your future generation, how about preserving your mother tongue for posterity’s sake? It’s never too late to start…

Read what linguists in this old Star (Nov 2007) article have to say about native languages in Australia:

Australia top ‘hot spot’ for vanishing languages by Will Dunham

“There are quite a few languages, dozens if not hundreds, that are down to one, two or three speakers, or maybe even they’ve lost their last fluent speakers but have a few ’semi-speakers’ who have a passive knowledge of the language,” Harrison said in a telephone interview.

“We’re going to lose an immense storehouse of knowledge,” Harrison added, noting for example that valuable information accumulated over centuries about various living species exists in languages of native peoples

“Many languages have no written form, meaning that they are lost forever when their last speaker dies,” Harrison said.

“Languages often trickle out of existence rather than sort of abruptly disappearing,” said Gregory Anderson, co-director of the Enduring Voices project and director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.

Over the years, some languages have been deliberately exterminated by colonizers or aggressors taking over territory or waging genocide, the linguists said.

“Children now often decide a language’s fate,” Harrison said, “by abandoning an ancestral tongue for another language they see as more widely used, for example, on television or in school.”

Copyright © 2007. Reuters

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