The Strange Case of the English Princess Who Knew Two Languages
A while ago, I read an enthusiastic piece of news in the British newspaper The Independent: Princess Charlotte, daughter of William and Kate, is bilingual!
1. The Bilingual Princess
The journalist was enthralled by the feat of the little princess who managed (imagine that!) to learn Spanish by talking with her Spanish nanny... She learned a language just by speaking! (The news I'm talking about is here.)
Forgive my hint of irony. I'm genuinely happy to think about little Charlotte speaking Spanish effortlessly — just as I'm happy to think about all the other children, starting with the children of immigrants, who learn two, three, sometimes four languages without making the headlines. Because, well, the princess's feat is not extraordinary. To learn two or more languages effortlessly, one does not need to be the great-granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II — nor, truth be told, have a special talent for languages. One just needs to be a child.
I was reminded of the news because I spent yesterday afternoon among children playing in various languages. My kids have two cousins born in England who are here, in Portugal, during their holidays. The oldest one is already five years old and speaks English and Portuguese (what would she do if she had a Spanish nanny?). Sometimes, in the middle of playing with my kids, she says a few things in English but immediately translates them. To them, it's all natural and an excuse for more laughter and jumping.
Now, my brother — father of the two girls — has two neighbors — a German and a Pole — who are also here on holidays. They joined us for a beach afternoon and brought their one-year-old daughter who is now beginning to say her first words. I'm sure that, in about three years, the girl will be able to speak a bit of English, as well as German and Polish.
My eldest niece, when she saw the neighbors showing up, was confused for a few seconds, as it happens to all of us when two of the worlds we move in collide. In her girlish voice, she warned them in English: "They speak Portuguese here... But don't worry, I'll teach you!"
The curious thing is, even if that couple started living here, they would probably not be able to learn Portuguese as well as my niece. Why?
It is certainly not because she descends from Portuguese and they do not. The only reason is this: their age! A child learns one, two, three languages with great ease — but, from adolescence onwards, the ability to learn another language decreases significantly. It's curious to think that languages are an exception to what is usual — after all, we learn almost everything more easily after adolescence: just try teaching equations to a child and a 25-year-old to realize that the child has a little more difficulty...
2. The Language Learning Machine
The brain seems to have a mechanism that aids in learning languages — a mechanism that begins to fade away at some point. A child can learn any language, as long as they interact with that language regularly. There are languages with millions of forms for each verb (yes, millions!) — a child learns them with ease. In fact, languages go through periods of simplification when they have to be learned by many adults — this is what happened with Persian and English, which underwent periods of simplification throughout their history. If transmission is done from adults to children, the younger ones learn the most ludicrous grammatical rules, maintaining or even increasing the complexity of the language.
The same does not happen with writing systems: symbols can be more or less complicated, and in fact, it is harder for a child to learn to write in Chinese than in Portuguese (regarding English, with its peculiar spelling, the difference may not be so clear). Writing is something artificial, that we learn with effort — in contrast, the grammar of the language, the one we learn before we write, is a system much more organic and natural than we think, accustomed as we are to see it embodied in books that describe the written form of the language.
Now, if it's amazing to think about the learning process of a single language by a child, what about the ability to learn several languages? A Portuguese child in Luxembourg, for example, will finish school knowing how to speak Portuguese (which they learned at home), French and German and probably Luxembourgish. They may not know all four languages at the same level, but they will certainly be able to speak them better than an adult who decides to learn them at the age of thirty.
3. Will So Many Languages Be Good for the Brain?
Today, it's common to say that learning multiple languages is beneficial. However, some still fear so many languages taking up space in children's brains.
A few years ago I heard about the case of a couple from the French Basque Country who refused Basque education for their child for fear it might spoil the child’s French. When I go to Spain and talk to a Spanish monolingual, I notice a certain horror when talking about the poor children of regions like Galicia or Catalonia, who are obliged to learn two languages (and English!). Even here, in Portugal, it is not hard to find those who think that foreign languages should not be taught too early — pushing their learning precisely to the age when that mechanism starts to switch off...
Then, there are those who are horrified when they realize that not always do immigrants' children learn the family language as if they were living in the country of origin. Now, each one of us always knows a portion of each language, but never the whole language. Languages are shared territories that no one knows in their entirety — for example, I can talk quite well in Portuguese with the accent of the South (one of the accents of the South, in fact), but I do not know a number of terms and intonations more typical of the North (and I'm sure there are many Southern terms that I also do not know). Similarly, I can talk with specialists in the areas I know well, but I feel foreign at a mental medicine conference. In English, I get on better with the written register than with familiar language — in Portuguese, I'm more used to using various registers. A child who only uses a language to talk with parents will know how to use it very well in that familiar register, but will have difficulty reading in that same language — unless they make the effort to read a lot.
4. Languages in Double
Bilingual children have a ticket to more languages, to more territories — maybe some of them will end up never exploring some of the languages they learned, while others live well, all their lives, in several languages, developing them as well or better than any monolingual speaker. These children have the advantage of accessing, quickly, more people, more texts, more conversations — and also of exercising the brain with two or three grammatical machines, which is an enviable form of mental gymnastics. If each language brings with it allusions, sayings, recurring jokes, words of different weights and values, two languages are a doubling of pleasure and possibility — and also of utility.
Therefore, I am pleased with Princess Charlotte — and even more pleased with my bilingual nieces and with all the children who, around the world, live in more than one language. Then, I look at my own children — I am amazed at how a child learns the words and phrases that whirl around them, slowly beginning to say sentences that no one else has said before, seizing the language and the world as if they were their own (and they are!).
Article written in the Summer of 2021.