Thanks for submitting the interesting article. I was surprised to read that parents in Europe are wary of bilingualism.
It is TIME-CONSUMING to maintain both languages at a high level, especially if literacy is expected in both languages and the languages are not cognate. We are trying to keep up Mandarin (not a NATIVE language for either parent in our family) and English (my native language) in our family of four children, and our children have plenty of interests that take a lot of time and attention (hacking on the computer, for my oldest), so literacy in Chinese is a struggle here where there is such a sparse supply of reading matter in Chinese. But it does seem worthwhile to make the effort.
An additional point: keeping multiple languages in use is easier for everyone in a family if each language is cued by particular situations, for example speaking to someone else who only knows one language the family knows. And sometimes habits can form patterns of language use even among multilingual people. For example, my wife speaks their joint native language with her two parents. She speaks a different language, the official language of her country of birth, with all five of her siblings. She can speak that language with me or with my children, but tends habitually to speak English (my sole native language and one native language of my children) with us. My children have varied in what language they speak to one another depending on what country they were living in at the time.
I guess its a little more difficult to be multilingual in primarily english speaking countries. But in countries like India (where I'm from) anybody who has gone to school can speak and write at least two languages, in most cases, 3 or more. This is possible because, every state in India has its own language, then there is a national language, and then there is English. So it becomes English + Hindi (national lang) + mother tongue (Tamil, Telugu, Marathi etc).
That said, those languages all have very limited scope, just within India. Not much useful for a career abroad. It does help in becoming a better language learner though.
I don't think parents in Europe are wary of bilingualism per se. I think they are wary of starting both languages at once. Many speak one language to their child until it speaks reasonably, and then start the second language (in pre-K or K years).
There are no right answers - either way, there is a tradeoff. Speaking two languages in the household makes it easier for the child to learn them; on the other hand, it does delay speech. My kid looked so desperate to communicate, I stuck to one language until she was fully verbal, and only started the second language afterwards, making it into a game.
Something that might explain this is that bilingual parents tend to be smarter than average so their child is more advanced to that. Also, with 40 babies I am not sure how strong the results are.
I think that's probably too broad a generalization. In much of the world multilinguialism is the norm, and monolinguialism the exception. Most people in India, China and Africa speak 2 or more languages or dialects. This is also true for much of Europe and some parts of the Americas and Oceanea: there are probably far more multilingual people in the world than monolingual. If you look at a big sample I think it's very unlikely that the average American or Chilean (countries that tend to be largely monolingual) is less intelligent than the average Indian or Moldovan - they're probably the same.
I think you're right to an extent - I don't think most parents speak multiple languages to the baby. Only when the baby grows into a child do they start learning multiple languages.
I'm inclined to think most parents from multilingual households do speak multiple languages with one another and with other adults; hence the baby is exposed to multiple languages.
(My interpretation of the article is that it pertains to languages heard by the baby, not per se the language(s) the parents choose to use when speaking directly to the baby).
Also there is research that suggests that the sounds made by babies already copy the unique speech patterns of the parent's native tongue(s) at a very early age.
In my own experience, when I could start to distinguish individual words spoken by both my children, these words were in fact from both my native language and English; to me it does not instinctively feel as if there is a demarcation from a baby growing into a child where there is suddenly a point at which they start absorbing multiple languages -- babies seem to absorb everything.
In fact, thinking back to my own childhood growing up in South Africa, I never made the distinction in my mind about there being words from multiple languages, until a much later age (4 or 5 probably); I guess before that it felt simply more like a "continuum" of language, without it mattering that some words had different phonics/rules associated with them.
As a previous reply said, that's a gross overgeneralization. The single biggest way that people become bilingual around the world is by living in community where more than one language is spoken (by immigration, by conquest, or by preexisting mixture of language groups), so there isn't any special selection of speakers by intelligence to find speakers who are bilingual. I have lived in a country in which the great majority of people are bilingual and some are trilingual, because the country had a government that imposed an official language on a population that was previously speakers of either of two languages--TWICE. (That is, twice the country was conquered by speakers of other languages, besides the two already there, and the school system was used to promote the invader's language(s).) Bilingualism is quite routine in many parts of the world. The submitted article's claim that growing up bilingual, as my wife did in the conquered country or as my children have in the United States, is beneficial may be true, but it would take gathering more evidence to show that most bilingual people are smarter than most monolingual people before the exposure to language-learning situations occurs.
I agree. Also at play is probably our cultural way of thinking about what "smart" constitutes.
Children absorb everything -- at their own pace, they learn how to walk, they learn their mother tongue etc, without parents "teaching" them by rote or by issuing instructions.
Likewise, if another language is used at home, children tend to pick that up too (to them its just a natural part of their environment).
In music, Suzuki (for example) was struck by how easily children acquire their mother tongue; he argued that if children were exposed to playing (violin eg) at an early age, as a natural part of their environment, they would acquire it as effortlessly as walking / mother tongue, without rote-teaching or even the concept of "music talent" being necessary. This seems to pan out in practice.
If there is a child who speaks two or three languages, and plays the violin, then our culture tends to consider this child "smart" (Or in the words of the article, perhaps not smarter but perhaps with an enhanced cognitive ability).
Does this say anything about intelligence? Probably not. But it does seem safe to say that the multilingual instrument-playing child will have some knowledge inside himself that skills can be acquired, and a confidence that comes from knowing he has done this before. And this will probably make learning easier / more fun in future.
Do you have some statistics to back up your first point? What makes you think that's the case?
Also, the article was referring to bilingual teaching of babies (i.e. a conscious decision on the part of the parents to speak one or two languages to the child).
Interesting, my interpretation is not at all that the article is referring to "teaching" of babies, merely to the languages to which the babies are exposed.
In my experience (based on observation of a community of immigrants from South Africa in Canada), parents instinctively engage in both English and Afrikaans at home, freely changing between languages (because that is what they are used to), without ever thinking about "teaching the baby another language."
As they grow older, some children seem to gravitate toward either the one or the other language in preference. This seems to be mostly related to a combination of the language primarily used at home (between the parents) and the language primarily used between parents and child.
In this community, I have seen parents making a conscious decision as to whether (or not) to engage in the native language with the child;
For example, parents may choose to limit the use of Afrikaans with the child for fear it will hold back the child's facility with English and thus cause difficulties at school;
Or, for example, parents may choose to engage in Afrikaans anyway (without particular preference for it over English), based on an instinctive feeling (and own experience from South Africa) that children pick up both languages anyway and that it seems to facilitate them in future (eg in learning other languages such as German).
Even in the face of such decisions, the parents still tend to remain in their own patterns at home; for example parents used to Afrikaans as home language might choose to speak primarily English with their children, but still use primarily Afrikaans with each other. The child is still exposed to both, and the babies (as they start speaking) are still using words from both.
Not at all so you may be right. I guess I was just thinking that more knowledge makes you more intelligent. In America I would expect skilled immigrants to be bilingual and I think there is some data to show that immigrants tend to be more intelligent on average than the people in the country they left.
Your second point might also be an explanation - parents who want to teach their children a second language might be more caring about education and might contribute a lot of other benefits to the baby.
As to your first point; there are many counterexamples where the people that remain in their country are as multi-lingual on average as the people who emigrate.
I would venture to say that level of ambition, education, opportunity & safety are more the factors influencing who would choose to emigrate and who wouldn't (or for whom the process would be administratively facilitated, since countries usually have profiles of desired immigrants), so I don't think its possible to infer a direct relation between language and intelligence by looking at skilled immigrants.
As said before it may be an over generalization. However, I think learning a language as an adult can be an indication of higher culture, education, or ambition. So next time you see somebody struggling with their pronunciation recognize all the effort and determination required for that person to learn a second language.
It is TIME-CONSUMING to maintain both languages at a high level, especially if literacy is expected in both languages and the languages are not cognate. We are trying to keep up Mandarin (not a NATIVE language for either parent in our family) and English (my native language) in our family of four children, and our children have plenty of interests that take a lot of time and attention (hacking on the computer, for my oldest), so literacy in Chinese is a struggle here where there is such a sparse supply of reading matter in Chinese. But it does seem worthwhile to make the effort.
An additional point: keeping multiple languages in use is easier for everyone in a family if each language is cued by particular situations, for example speaking to someone else who only knows one language the family knows. And sometimes habits can form patterns of language use even among multilingual people. For example, my wife speaks their joint native language with her two parents. She speaks a different language, the official language of her country of birth, with all five of her siblings. She can speak that language with me or with my children, but tends habitually to speak English (my sole native language and one native language of my children) with us. My children have varied in what language they speak to one another depending on what country they were living in at the time.