Q: If a newborn child grows up
hearing people speaking in many different languages, will it later be able to
speak all those languages?
— Puneesh T., India
اضافة اعلان
A: Children learn languages from the people around them. If they
are exposed to multiple languages, they may grow up bilingual or multilingual.
These kinds of environments are not unusual; the consensus among linguists is
that a majority of children in the world grow up hearing multiple languages.
So, what if a child were raised in an environment where they
were exposed to dozens or hundreds of languages? We can imagine an Oliver
Twist-type character, growing up in some sort of hypothetical global train station,
interacting with a rotating cast of station employees and visitors from all
over the world. Could such a child become omnilingual?
Probably not, said Suzy J. Styles, a developmental psychologist
at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who studies language
acquisition. One obstacle is time: The more languages you’re exposed to, the
less exposure you have to each one. If you’re learning 365 languages in a year,
you can’t have more than one full day of exposure to each one.
Our scenario also leaves out something fundamental, Styles said:
what the child wants. Children aren’t just sponges that absorb everything
around them. (If they were, meal times would be a lot easier.) They pay
attention to the world and develop feelings and opinions about it, and that
plays a big role in how they learn.
“Kids are motivated by watching others use their language
together,” Styles said. “And they are generally motivated to use those
languages that they see having the greatest social impact.” If a nondescript
traveler wanders through the station speaking an unfamiliar language and no one
pays attention to them, the child probably won’t either. But if someone really
cool shows up speaking Icelandic or ancient Minoan, and everyone turns to look,
the child will notice.
If people seem excited to talk to the newcomer, the child may
get the impression that the language is cool and desirable to know. Children
pay more attention to the speech of people they’re interested in and the people
they want to imitate.
In other words, to learn lots of languages, kids don’t just need
exposure, they need motivation. “One place particularly well known for its
linguistic density is the highlands of Papua New Guinea,” Styles said, “where
being able to communicate in several neighboring languages is a great social
advantage.” In situations like those, she said, children can learn to
communicate fluently in a wide variety of languages.
So if you want to encourage a child to learn a lot of languages,
you need to expose them to many of them — and make those languages seem
desirable, even cool.
How do you do that? Well, I honestly might not be the best
person to ask. Despite my best efforts, “How to make something seem cool to
kids at school” is a skill I never did get the hang of.
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