#2: Going with the plurilingual flow

🧠A Q&A with education researcher Max Antony-Newman

I worried about many things in the earliest days of multicultural parenting, but language wasn’t one of them. I figured my Beloved and I would speak our respective native tongues with the children, and that’d be it.

I was naïve, and it wasn’t that straightforward being the only French speaker in my offspring’s life. When my eldest was an (enthusiastically verbal) toddler, I’d speak French to him and he’d respond 90% of the time in Catalan—the dominant language in our day-to-day. Or during short family visits, he’d seem constrained trying to communicate with other French speakers, and I felt that people we love couldn’t really know him. I wasn’t actually concerned about his eventual language skills, but felt sad and unexpectedly, deeply lonely.

I’m not sharing this to scare you! (I’m having a different experience with one of his siblings, and your own situation may vary widely.) But if your first language is the minority one in your family setup, I’d encourage you to think about what resources you can actively draw on, so you can protect that language and feel supported doing so.

Research on plurilingual parenting by education researcher Max Antony-Newman, now at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, has helped me to put words to our family’s experience. I came across Antony-Newman’s work on UK website The Conversation in July, and breathed a big sigh of recognition. (The piece was titled: “Plurilingual parenting: why many experts think families who speak multiple languages should just go with the flow”). He kindly agreed to speak about his research with Home Mixed Home and I hope his insights will be helpful to you, too.

(I’ve edited our questions and answers for brevity and clarity.)

I remember feeling relief reading about your research. I thought: Ah, this language jumble is a real thing! We’re okay!

That article resonated with many people! [...] Plurilingualism, as opposed to monolingual ideology, looks at languages from a dynamic perspective. It acknowledges and normalises partial proficiencies in several languages as the lived reality of many people. That’s when you speak one language better than the other, or your speaking skills are better than your writing skills in one language. This partial proficiency is an empirical fact, in families, in the classroom, in society at large, in language learning. People are not perfectly bilingual or multilingual, and that's fine. 

Could you describe the study you conducted with 19 families as part of your PhD research?

It was part of a larger project looking at parental involvement and engagement strategies of immigrant parents in Canada. The two parents in each family were born and studied in Central and Eastern Europe¹ [before moving to Canada as skilled migrants].

In this study, I asked them questions such as: Which languages do you speak at home? Do you read to your children in your first language? Is it important for you to keep your heritage language? Have you sent your kids to additional classes in your home language? When I looked at my data, I realised what is happening is fluid and complex. Because I was aware of plurilingualism as a theoretical framework, I analysed the data from that perspective and my wife [Marina Antony-Newman] helped me develop the concept of plurilingual parenting. It gives voice to, and explains what's happening in immigrant families. 

Do you practice plurilingual parenting in your own home?

Yes, I'm similar to the parents I interviewed for my study. I was born in Ukraine and moved to Canada as an adult, did my master's and PhD there. My wife is also from Ukraine; we were born in the former Soviet Union, speaking Russian as the first, dominant language of instruction, and Ukrainian as a subject in school. We have three kids, one of them went to school in English and French in Canada.

What did the families’ linguistic practices look like in your study? 

Let’s take for example a Serbian family. All the parents in the study completed university in their home countries, so they had well-developed oral and written skills in their first language. They would speak Serbian at home, the children would speak a combination of English and Serbian to their parents, and English and French at school. The parents would read books in Serbian to the children and they all would have partial proficiency in these different languages.

In a stricter model, the parents would say: We only speak Serbian at home, or We want you to speak English to us so that we improve our English. That’s a monolingual ideology. The key idea is separation, be it one parent, one language or one setting, one language. Some families in the study tried a strict language separation policy, but it didn't work; [children resisted using their parents’ first language and brought English from school and their friends]. Then they relaxed over time, especially as the children grew older and parents felt comfortable that their children can still keep their home language. The other half never had a strict policy to begin with. Over time, all of these families’ [language policies] get flexible.

I found that immigrant parents adopt plurilingual parenting, which is characterised by the following features:

1. parental beliefs in the dynamic and fluid nature of language practices;

2. family language policies that are flexible and allow for partial proficiency in languages in familial linguistic repertoires; and

3. interconnectedness of language and culture.

Source: Max Antony-Newman (2022) The role of plurilingual parenting in parental engagement of immigrant families, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2022.2097686

I guess it happens with parenting in general. Many of us relax our principles over time! Though when I was pregnant, I didn’t expect that language would become such an emotional issue for me as a parent.

That's true. Some parents in the study mentioned that language and culture are related; for them, it’s a question of identity. It's not just about being able to talk to the grandparents when they visit, it’s more than instrumental. There was one Ukrainian couple in the study where the father said: It's very important [that our son speaks Ukrainian] because it's who we are, it's part of our culture. But the mother said she was okay with her son speaking English and not using Ukrainian, because they were in Canada now. Within one family, you can have this diversity of opinions. They have to negotiate.

The power of the dominant language—which is supported by the state, media and education—is inevitable unless we have a major shift in policies. [...] Some education researchers are trying to normalise the use of multiple languages, to bring home languages into the classroom. [...] Ten years ago, there were almost no strategies. Now there are projects, articles and books being published, so teachers can get guidelines.

Where does “one person, one language” (OPOL) come from? It still seems to be considered the gold standard in certain settings.

It's based on the assumption that you have brain compartments for each language. Neuroscience developed in recent decades, and we now know from brain imaging that it’s more complex and fluid than that. But in a formal school context for example, OPOL seems to make sense because teachers are seen as the ideal speaker² who can speak, read, and write one language perfectly. At home, things are different. 

Where does the monolingual model come from?

First, it's important to mention that linguistic diversity has been a fact of life for thousands of years. At the moment we have about 7,000 languages around the world, many of which  are endangered indigenous and minority languages. 

With the rise of the Nation-States in Europe in the 19th century, there was this idea of “one nation, one language.” When governments [for instance in France, Germany, and Britain] tried to centralise their countries, this happened at the detriment of minority languages which were spoken in different provinces. The European colonial projects also spread dominant languages across the globe. There was always diversity, but also pressure to make it homogeneous, because it's easier to govern and, for identity purposes, to unite people around one language. After the Second World War, immigration intensified to the global North, from the former colonies to Europe. [Migrants] came to a mostly monolingual context. The discourse was: you come to, say, America, you should speak American English. 

Was this a top-down push from governments, or pragmatic decisions on the ground?

I think it was a combination of anxiety about the influx of immigrants who were culturally and linguistically different, and also studies and beliefs that speaking more than one language could cause delays of language development, or that children of immigrants wouldn’t do well academically. But those studies would often conflate socio-economic class with linguistic background. Researchers found that, say, Italian or Portuguese immigrants in the US and Canada who lived in precarious housing conditions didn't do well at school. But in Canada, there were multiple studies when French immersion school programmes were introduced in the late 1960s, early 1970s³. When applied linguists started studying these programmes, they realised that having two languages is not detrimental to success. 

When you say “success”, what were the endpoints that the researchers focused on?

They looked at their grades and standardised tests.

So we're not talking about individual wellbeing, or a sense of identity?

In the 1970s, researchers were looking at those easily measurable outcomes. But as time went by in the 1980s and 1990s, applied linguists started talking about identity and wellbeing, and paying attention to plurilingualism. 

What’s your advice for parents who speak different languages among themselves, unlike the couples in your study?

First, I want to say that all parents want the best for their children, for their learning and linguistic development. So parents are already doing a good job by being invested in their children's education.

From a plurilingual perspective, it's important to acknowledge all the resources that they have. If they have a multicultural, multilingual relationship, they may have 2, 3, or 4 languages, so embrace that. Don't worry about children not acquiring the dominant language; they will. Try to protect the minoritised languages: read to your children for pleasure in different languages, provide them with access to books. If you think that your child needs more development in a particular language, then obviously you can shift your attention to that language. Cross-linguistic awareness helps: notice the connections, similarities and differences between languages. Make people feel good about languages: “purity” isn’t always a goal. There’s space for mixing and switching.

1. In this sample, both parents came from the same country: either Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovakia, Romania, Russia or Ukraine.

2. Antony-Newman adds that “from the plurilingual perspective, it should not be a requirement for teachers to be native speakers, they only have to have a high proficiency necessary for a particular type of teaching or programme. [...] The idea of a teacher as a fully proficient native speaker comes from the same language separation ideology.”

3. Initially in Québec, then the model spread across other Canadian provinces, and abroad.