Multilingualism versus “German, our One and Only”?

Georg Gombos

In allusion to Wittgenstein, one might say that the world of a multilingual person is different from that of someone monolingual. For a multilingual person, communicating in two or more languages is part of everyday normality;

for a monolingual person, this normality often remains a riddle, even though thousands of years of history have shown that human beings are potentially multilingual and that children are capable of learning several languages simultaneously from an early age. People tend to forget, or prefer to ignore, the fact that worldwide, monolingualism is the exception rather than the rule and in many places has only been instituted by force (some 60 regional and minority languages in the EU alone make it obvious that such “language standardisation” was not completely effective).

In Austria, there appears to be a certain linguistic hierarchy: excellent, accent-free mastery of German – preferably the local dialect – is considered of prime importance. This is followed by languages with high prestige – first and foremost, English. The multilingualism of those who speak languages that have a lower “status” in society is seen in quite a different light, being mainly perceived only as a problem, a deficit (“children whose mother tongue is not German”). A person’s linguistic expression, however, is indivisible – it is always a matter of the same basic competences and the same person.
Giving anyone – particularly children – the verbal or non-verbal message: “Your language is ugly, useless, valueless, simply a problem” will always be perceived as personal disparagement. Disparaging a person’s language can have negative effects on the other language(s) that person speaks. Inversely, approaching a language positively can also foster the learning process of other languages. Languages do not compete with each other, they support each other – provided the environment takes this view and supports the learning process in all the languages of the child in question. It is important to foster multilingualism in all children from an early age. It has been shown that if this is done over a relatively long period (including reading and writing) with qualitative success, these children profit in the long run: they are more creative, deal better with abstracts, think about languages more positively and learn further languages more easily.

Consequently: the world of a multilingual person is different from that of a monolingual person. And the idea “German, our one and only (plus English, of course!)” is a dead-end street as far as language teaching is concerned; it harms society – from the economic perspective as well – and the individual.

Georg Gombos is an Associate Professor at the Alpen-Adria-Universtität Klagenfurt, Department of Educational Sciences and Research, Division for Intercultural Education. His main areas of interest are interculturality and multilingualism.