

Bilingual Babies Get Head Start -- Before They Can Talk - dangoldin
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090413-bilingual-babies.html?source=rss

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tokenadult
Thanks for submitting the interesting article. I was surprised to read that
parents in Europe are wary of bilingualism.

It is TIME-CONSUMING to maintain both languages at a high level, especially if
literacy is expected in both languages and the languages are not cognate. We
are trying to keep up Mandarin (not a NATIVE language for either parent in our
family) and English (my native language) in our family of four children, and
our children have plenty of interests that take a lot of time and attention
(hacking on the computer, for my oldest), so literacy in Chinese is a struggle
here where there is such a sparse supply of reading matter in Chinese. But it
does seem worthwhile to make the effort.

An additional point: keeping multiple languages in use is easier for everyone
in a family if each language is cued by particular situations, for example
speaking to someone else who only knows one language the family knows. And
sometimes habits can form patterns of language use even among multilingual
people. For example, my wife speaks their joint native language with her two
parents. She speaks a different language, the official language of her country
of birth, with all five of her siblings. She can speak that language with me
or with my children, but tends habitually to speak English (my sole native
language and one native language of my children) with us. My children have
varied in what language they speak to one another depending on what country
they were living in at the time.

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vijayr
I guess its a little more difficult to be multilingual in primarily english
speaking countries. But in countries like India (where I'm from) anybody who
has gone to school can speak and write at least two languages, in most cases,
3 or more. This is possible because, every state in India has its own
language, then there is a national language, and then there is English. So it
becomes English + Hindi (national lang) + mother tongue (Tamil, Telugu,
Marathi etc).

That said, those languages all have very limited scope, just within India. Not
much useful for a career abroad. It does help in becoming a better language
learner though.

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dangoldin
Something that might explain this is that bilingual parents tend to be smarter
than average so their child is more advanced to that. Also, with 40 babies I
am not sure how strong the results are.

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jgrahamc
Do you have some statistics to back up your first point? What makes you think
that's the case?

Also, the article was referring to bilingual teaching of babies (i.e. a
conscious decision on the part of the parents to speak one or two languages to
the child).

~~~
dangoldin
Not at all so you may be right. I guess I was just thinking that more
knowledge makes you more intelligent. In America I would expect skilled
immigrants to be bilingual and I think there is some data to show that
immigrants tend to be more intelligent on average than the people in the
country they left.

Your second point might also be an explanation - parents who want to teach
their children a second language might be more caring about education and
might contribute a lot of other benefits to the baby.

~~~
pcc
As to your first point; there are many counterexamples where the people that
remain in their country are as multi-lingual on average as the people who
emigrate.

I would venture to say that level of ambition, education, opportunity & safety
are more the factors influencing who would choose to emigrate and who wouldn't
(or for whom the process would be administratively facilitated, since
countries usually have profiles of desired immigrants), so I don't think its
possible to infer a direct relation between language and intelligence by
looking at skilled immigrants.

