BEING BILINGUAL

BEING BILINGUAL

Ever more children and youngsters who live in Europe are bilingual. This is different from immigrants born in one culture and brought up in another. It is also different from children brought up in a single culture and single language context who then for some reason become multicultural and multilingual. For many youngsters in Europe multilingualism is a way of life. They travel for work or study and when they meet other youngsters on a train or plane they no longer ask “Where are you from?”. They marry and have children with people from all around Europe. Multilingualism is not just a social and cultural fact. It has an impact on brain cognitive function. With respect to monolinguals, bilinguals find it easier to understand that the behavior of people with reference to a certain situation has more to do with the ideas they have grown up with, whether right or wrong, than with how the situation actually is objectively. Bilinguals might make speaking mistakes but they never mistake the context in which to speak one language or the other. These observations suggest that bilinguals find it easier to understand social situations with respect to monolinguals and also accept that different people see reality in different ways. Multiculturalism is no longer something acquired or learned as a social norm, but is an innate trait that comes from within. Possibly, studying languages is a rather inexpensive antidote for certain forms of cultural intolerance.

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