Towards a more multilingual co-existence: dismantling the misperception of linguistic hierarchy

It’s a warm, late summer’s afternoon in Barcelona and I’m going for a coffee with Ana and Davide, a couple originally from Argentina who have called the Catalan capital their home for the past ten years. Ana and Davide are the proud parents of two twin boys who have just started attending their local school. As is the norm in the autonomous community of Catalonia, all of their education is delivered in Catalan.

“It’s not a problem for now,” Ana tells me as she sips her coffee. “The kids are like sponges. They speak Spanish and Catalan fluently. But what about the future? Would they be able to speak Spanish properly if we ever went back to Argentina? How would they adjust back to life there?”

For other parts of the world still struggling to establish successful models of bilingual education and reverse centuries of linguistic imperialism, Catalonia may be a beacon of success. For expatriate parents such as Ana and Davide, however, the Catalan system is a cause for concern. As a result, they have taken the financially strenuous decision to place their children in a private school from September, where they will only be educated in Spanish.

Neurolinguistics expert and professor at the University of Edinburgh Thomas Bak describes this decision as possibly the most “expensive way to cognitively disadvantage your child”. Bak, who believes that multilingualism is in fact the norm of human experience, sees the monolingualism that has accompanied the growth of the mono-ethnic and mono-cultural nation state since the start of the 20th century as an anomaly.

Learning to speak an additional language at any age is, according to Bak, the cognitive equivalent of performing a “full body work-out”. There is no activity that greater challenges the brain and causes it to grow. Children who are lucky enough to grow up in an educational environment such as Catalonia that lives and breathes bilingualism are, unfortunately, a rarity in today’s Europe, where multilingualism is often dismissed as a “native language +1” model, the “+1” usually being English.

Yet why is learning a so-called “regional” language such as Catalan looked upon so unfavourably by expatriate parents in Catalonia? Simply put, because if the world of linguistic diversity is viewed from a vocational standpoint, Castilian Spanish – which thanks to the legacy of Spanish colonialism is now a global supergiant with over 500 million native speakers – is arguably more “useful”.

From a neurolinguistic standpoint, however, the more complex orthography, vast regional dialectic variations and more nuanced grammatical structures of Catalan could make it a cognitively more challenging, and therefore more useful language for the brain to learn – although it is key to stress that the ideal aim is bilingualism, and therefore proficiency in both languages.

Parity, however, between a global supergiant and a language that within living memory was banned for official use by the Spanish government, is not necessarily easy to achieve organically. This was certainly the experience at Momo, an alternative primary school in the leafy suburb of Esplugues, where educating the next generation to be equally proficient in both Spanish and Catalan was always of the utmost importance.

After trialling the use of both languages in the classroom, teachers found that the moment the kids got onto the playground, the only language used amongst its diverse group of pupils from around the world was Spanish. As a result, the decision was made to actively counteract this by exclusively using and promoting Catalan in the classroom. Since then, a degree of balance has been restored. Spanish is still spoken at playtime, yet the pupils now spend equal parts of their day immersed in both languages.

It is impossible to overestimate the extent to which culturally, politically and financially an artificially constructed linguistic hierarchy that is the direct result of historical error exists in today’s Europe. Carefully managed, closely monitored and constantly iterated affirmative linguistic action has thus far proven to be the only way to actively dismantle this highly damaging misperception, and move towards a more multilingual, more peaceful, and more democratic co-existence of peoples on our continent.

Alex Rawlings is a writer, freelance journalist and language expert. He has studied over 15 languages and is the author of two books: How To Speak Any Language Fluently and From Amourette to Żal: Bizarre and Beautiful Words from around Europe.