Being bilingual has its advantages: you can speak two languages really well, which may improve your job prospects and open many a door, you have a linguistic instinct for what sounds right and what wrong in two languages, which can make you faster in lots of situations. Learning a third language becomes easier they say. Finally, you are richer as a person, because you know two cultures and at the same time have the advantage of an outside observer: you can see/feel a culture through the eyes of the other culture.
Being bilingual, however, means a lot more than this. It takes a special effort, or better: a greater effort, to speak two languages. You can speak one effortlessly. They say it just comes naturally. Speaking two languages involves greater self-control: you need to control your vowels and even your consonants, your intonation, your pauses and your words. Sometimes when you’re tired these things can simply go wrong. At such moments I don’t get right my third person singular pronouns (Hungarian has got only one, Slovene has three – each having a different gender that affects the verbs and the nouns in the sentence too). The quality of my /e/ sounds odd at times, at others I can’t remember a word in one language but I know it in the other.
Being bilingual also means that you become a different person form a cultural point of view. You may seem odd to speakers around you. The Hungarians, for example, use the words Thank you You’re welcome and Please a lot more often than the Slovenes. The way Hungarians express hospitality and courtesy may seem exaggerated to Slovenes. And there are endless situations when little things you do or say are met with puzzlement. Such situations make you seem odd or even strange.
When you realize you got it wrong again, when you realize the person you’re speaking to does not share your culture and your cultural values, you also realize that none of the cultures do, because your culture is a combination of the two cultures and their values and these never match any of the cultures perfectly. You feel lonesome and puzzled and it takes another bilingual person to understand these feelings. At times I wish I were monolingual. My children are. And I’m proud of the fact that they have a mother tongue. They are learning foreign languages but it’s clear which language is the dominant one.
I’ve brought up this issue because bilingual education or CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) has become the buzz word in the European Union. Huge funds are spent on projects that experiment with CLIL, which is meant to replace foreign language education. On the one hand this would save the EU a lot of expenses on translations, on the other it would introduce a hegemony of a single European language through the back door. Integration at its worst and at a huge cost.(To be continued.)
Filed under: CLIL
