And the Young Shall Speak in Tongues

Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa is an American with Japanese roots, married to an Ecuadorean. They live in the French part of Switzerland and send their three children to a German school.

Seems a situation ripe for confusion. But the children take it in stride.

Eight-year-old Natalie switches effortlessly among English, Spanish, French and German. Gabriel, 5, is trying to follow suit, while 3-year-old Mateo is already a chatterbox--and doesn’t mind what he chats in.

“I like the languages--it’s fun,” said a grinning Natalie, who’s busy planning a birthday sleepover with five friends: a Canadian, a German, a Colombian, an Anglo-Swiss and a Canadian-German.

And the linguistic lilt of the midnight whispers? Natalie doesn’t really know, although she’s sure the conversation will flow.

It’s proof, said her proud mother, that young children have an immense capacity to absorb different languages without being confused or overwhelmed--provided they are taught consistently.

Tokuhama-Espinosa’s conviction resounds in a book she’s just published to give parents straightforward advice about the many pleasures and pitfalls of “Raising Multilingual Children.”

Her underlying message is: Parents should start as early as possible; use their native tongue; don’t mix languages; and introduce non-family languages by encouraging children to associate them with a certain situation like school or extracurricular activities like music.

Despite the global advance of English on the Internet, Tokuhama-Espinosa believes multilingualism is increasingly relevant in the era of globalization, with its swirling tides of immigration and growing numbers of people working for foreign companies.

In a world that boasts some 6,000 different dialects and languages, there’s nothing novel about multilingualism. In some West African countries, it’s not uncommon for people to speak five or six tongues from different language families such as Bantu, Niger-Kordofan and Indo-European.

Even so, research into the subject is still in its relative infancy, especially when it comes to the maximum number of languages that can be absorbed, said Calvin Gidney, professor of child development at Tufts University near Boston.

Most experts agree that bi-, tri- or multilingualism is easiest for the young, although there’s no consensus on the best starting age or the ideal number of languages. All stress that much depends on individual children and their environments.

Tim Connell, a professor of languages at London’s City University, is on the maximist side.

“I do not believe for one moment that children can be overtaxed,” he said. “I think the more you can stuff into children while the brain is still malleable, the more they learn.”

Some Feel Some Kids May Get Overwhelmed

Marilyn Vihman, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Wales, is more cautious. She thinks some young children can be overloaded and, if so, then it’s best to drop unnecessary languages.

She believes 10- to 12-year-olds are probably the most receptive to languages because they have the necessary learning skills and don’t yet have anxieties to slow them down. By the late teens, language students find it hard to shake off accents, Vihman and most other experts say.

Vihman has another caution for enthusiastic foreign-language teachers.

“In places like Japan, they teach 3-year-olds English because they think it’s important to start early, but the teachers are not native speakers of English. So the children pick up the accent they hear and also forget very quickly if they are not exposed,” said Vihman, an American who’s married to an Estonian.

“Faddish exposure of nursery-school children to languages [that] isn’t consistently carried through and has no real function in their life is utterly pointless,” she argued.

There seems little risk of that in the laughter-filled Tokuhama-Espinosa house just outside Geneva.

Tokuhama-Espinosa said she learned the need for consistency from her middle son, Gabriel, who lapsed into silence when the family moved from Ecuador to Boston and she switched into Spanish to make sure he didn’t forget it. It totally confused him, she said. She knows many other families who got it wrong, leaving their children tongue-tied.

Even Natalie, who has more of a natural talent for languages than Gabriel, has a smaller vocabulary in German than most of her classmates. So it’s not all a bed of roses, Tokuhama-Espinosa said.

She conceded her family is lucky. They live in Switzerland, which has four official languages (German, French, Italian and Romansch), and they also are in the linguistic melting pot of Geneva, with its vast diplomatic community.

Tokuhama-Espinosa, a native of California who earned her master’s of education at Harvard, has taught in international schools in Japan, Ecuador and France. Her husband, Cristian, a diplomat, attended a German school as a boy in the Ecuadorean capital, Quito, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received intense coaching in Japanese prior to a posting in Tokyo.

She said her message that parents can bring up bilingual, even multilingual, children is as relevant for high-flying expatriates as it is for the disadvantaged.

“Here it’s a nice and privileged environment. In the United States, having a second language is a basic necessity for millions of immigrants,” she said.

There are 31 million Latinos in the United States and their numbers are expected to triple by 2050, when they will likely account for one-fourth of all Americans.

“In the United States we’re very poor at emphasizing the good qualities about multilingualism,” Tokuhama-Espinosa said.