Effects of Monolingualism

07/19/2010

My hope is that we do not try to recreate the old ways that were not working, but instead bring with us the joy, knowledge and care that we had before as a foundation of our co-constructed present and future.
Ijumaa Jordan, Early Childhood Consultant

In her article, "Multilingual Children in Monolingual Centers," in Children in Europe (December 2007), Serap Sikcam describes the impact on multilingual migrant children of monolingual German child care centers:

"They start to feel insecure and cannot actively participate in the learning processes. They have little opportunity to display their acquired linguistic skills or to develop them further. Many ask themselves at an early stage whether they are allowed to use both languages and whether they have to opt for only one. They experience not only devaluation of their family language(s) but also of their identity.

"They perceive at an early age that languages are valued differently and the hierarchies between languages and the people that speak them. Children with valued first languages, e.g., English or French, are almost automatically deemed capable of learning German; children whose first language has a low status, e.g., Persian or Arabic, are categorized as problematic language learners. Children speaking the majority language also receive the message that languages are valued differently. They experience their language receiving greater acknowledgment and that this applies to them as speakers of this language. This can lead to the development of a feeling of superiority in majority children and of inferiority in migrant children, which is damaging for everyone. It can lead all children to the conclusion that monolingualism is normal while multilingualism is not."

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