Macau Matters | The value in being multilingual

Richard Whitfield

I grew up in a family and suburb of English native speakers, and even my Greek, Italian and Lebanese school friends only spoke English. The only way to really learn a language is to speak it in daily life and so I grew up totally monolingual. I did not see this as any problem until I moved to Hong Kong and grew vaguely envious of all my new multilingual friends.
I gradually came to the view that being multilingual had value in social richness and now believe that some concepts are unique to the language of their expression. But I never really had any concrete evidence of this added value, until reading Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday”.
Among many other topics and issues covered in this excellent book, he reports on studies showing that while monolingual people may have a somewhat larger vocabulary (10+%) compared to a multilingual person fluent in the same language, the overall vocabulary of the multilingual person is much larger (because they know vocabulary in more than one language).
Also, studies show that children who grow up multilingual because people regularly speak with them in different languages from birth achieve language proficiency milestones (e.g. the age at which they start to speak, have a 50 word vocabulary, etc.) at the same age as monolingual children, once socio-economic status and others factors are considered. Thus there is no learning disadvantage in immersing very young children in multiple languages – they quickly learn to switch language on the fly, depending on who they are talking to, and very rarely confuse words in different languages.
The book also reports on other studies that have shown that multilingual children and adults perform better in situations where the rules keep on changing, e.g. in games where the rules change depending on the last move. The implication is that multilingual people have greater intellectual flexibility and can adapt significantly more easily to rapidly changing situations – they “switch operating mode” when their monolingual colleagues blunder on without recognizing that things have changed.
Finally, the book reports on some studies that reveal that older multilingual people can cope much better with the brain damage associated with Alzheimer’s Disease than monolingual people. With the same levels of physical damage, the onset of memory loss and other symptoms is delayed by 4+ years for multilingual people compared to similar monolingual people. The extra intellectual “exercise” associated with your brain constantly checking to see if a language change is needed seems to be much better than the typical advice given to older people to do cross-word puzzles and play Sudoku.
I am sure that much more research is needed, but there are definite hints emerging that being multilingual can have significant life benefits.
In Macau most school kids are supposedly multilingual but their second language is mostly only studied in the classroom and this is not worthwhile. To be truly multilingual you need to be immersed in the languages and use them all the time in your daily life, and from a very early age – a few hours a week in a school classroom just does not cut it. It has always been obvious to me that the English language skills of ethnic Chinese from Singapore is much better than those from Hong Kong because it is the “lingua franca” of talking in the street among different ethnic groups in Singapore, and the racial mix there means that you cannot avoid talking to different ethnic groups (unlike Hong Kong which is nearly all Chinese).
I am not sure how to do it, but making Macau kids truly multilingual should bring significant benefits.