Bilingualism / Mehrsprachigkeit

The fact that this blog on biligualism follows my blog on dialects is completely coincidental. While on a similar topic - language - this one has been on my mind for a while, since we were at Sonnwies in Südtirol, which was a fascinating study for bilingualism. I've been thinking about it a lot but wasn't inspired to write about it until playing bingo with Nikolas today.

Earlier we had gone to a flea market and found a couple great toys for Nikolas, including a Ravensburger bingo game. It has different picture cards with numbers on them so you can create your own playing card and has a couple 10-sided dice which are pretty cool. It's meant for multiplication bingo, but with a few changes to the rules has become bilingual bingo modeled after a game we saw a family playing out on the patio at Sonnwies. The family was from Belgium, but the mother/step-mother was British. Emma, at age three, was being raised completely biligually - her mother speaking only English to her, her father speaking Flemish (a Dutch dialect).

One day Emma was playing with the other kids in mini club with the big parachute. Katrin, the 'teacher', explained the game in Italian for the Italian-speaking children and then in German for the German-speaking children and then again in English for Emma. Not only did I find it extraordinary that a three-year-old Belgian girl could be on vacation in Italy and communicating in English, but also the fact that Katrin, a lovely but completely ordinary young woman, born and raised in Northern Italy, was fluent in three languages. Make that four, actually, because Katrin also speaks the local German dialect of the region which is ganz anders from the standard German she uses at work.

Emma's step-sisters, ages ten and twelve, are also bilingual. They speak English and Flemish, the English partly because of their step-mother but mostly because they've studied English in school for a number of years. One afternoon the step-sisters were in the sauna during children's sauna hour sitting around talking with a couple of the pre-teen boys from Germany. Their language of communication? English. The boys also had a few years of English study at school under their belts, all four of these children being fluent enough in the foreign language that they could sit around a sauna and chat about whatever pre-teens chat about.

On another day, Peter was sitting in the sand box (watching Nikolas play in the sand) and started talking with another man. The man spoke standard German, not a dialect, as his native language. It thrilled Peter to bits, and so the two started talking about languages. As it turned out, the man lives only a few miles from the Luxembourg border where they speak Luxembourgish, a German dialect. The man is a PE teacher at the EU school in Luxembourg (where he earns a salary of 84,000 Euros per school year - or approximately $112,000!!!) and he is fluent in German, French, and English. The students at the EU school are also bilingual or trilingual, and so he teaches his PE classes in whichever language the students choose.

All of this is so amazing to me, people learning and knowing multiple languages, and yet it is so ordinary here. People learn languages so that they can communicate with others, the world opened up to them in a way that those of us who only know one language can't experience. I am left wondering, why hasn't language learning caught on in the United States?