A three-year-old named Bart wanders out of his bedroom on a damp Tuesday afternoon in north London with his hair sticking up in five different directions. He asks for a biscuit and, somewhere between the kitchen counter and the radiator, decides that he would prefer to count in Spanish. His parents hardly blink. They’re accustomed to it by now. Italian shows up for breakfast. Dutch arrives during bath time. The gaps are filled by English. Maurice, the family’s border terrier, receives instructions in the language that is most convenient for him.
A British childhood increasingly resembles this. Of course, not for everyone. However, two languages are the floor, not the ceiling, for a significant and increasing percentage of young children. By 2021, there were about six million non-British citizens in the UK, and about 9.6 million of them were foreign-born. The majority of that movement was absorbed by London. More than 300 languages are currently spoken in the city’s schools, and approximately one in five students nationwide speak English as a second language. This is known to anthropologists as superdiversity, a term taken from the German researcher Steven Vertovec. It’s a term with a clinical sound that, up close, sounds a lot like typical family life.
Before Bart was born, his parents, Riccardo Attanasio and Gwen Jansen, did not sit down with a spreadsheet. “We didn’t have a plan as such,” Attanasio states, “but we knew we wanted to raise him trilingual.” His own father had enforced strict rules regarding Italian at home, in part so that the kids could communicate with their Italian grandparents and in part because failing to speak the language felt like letting something more serious slip away. Jansen, who relocated from the Netherlands ten years ago, speaks English to her husband and Dutch to Bart. Bart, on the other hand, responds primarily in English and occasionally uses a funny Dutch word. The term “stout,” which means “naughty” or “silly,” has become a household favorite and is frequently used to describe both dogs and toddlers.
The fact that they don’t care about the mess of it is refreshing. The traditional guidance given to multilingual families usually includes guidelines. Each parent is asked to use only one language under the one-parent-one-language approach. The minority-language-at-home approach maintains the local language outside the front door and the heritage language inside. Each has supporters. In actuality, both may seem inflexible when attempting to persuade a young child to wear a coat.
Linguists are beginning to adopt a more recent theory that has the benefit of matching what families like Bart’s already do. This approach, known as plurilingualism, views language as a functional toolkit rather than a collection of closed compartments. According to Marina Antony-Newman, a doctoral researcher at the UCL Institute of Education, it is a dynamic perspective that prioritizes context over the illusive ideal of the native speaker and accepts partial proficiency. The difference is important. Being multilingual means being able to speak multiple languages. Plurilingualism is switching between them in the middle of a sentence, responding to a question posed in one language by selecting the first word that appears.
According to researchers, the advantages go beyond party-trick fluency. Raised in this manner, children typically acquire improved multitasking skills, sharper attention, and a type of cognitive flexibility that lasts into adulthood. According to a 2017 study from Edinburgh University, stroke victims who were multilingual had a much higher chance of regaining normal cognitive function. Additional research suggests a lower chance of dementia in later life. Although researchers themselves disagree on the magnitude of the effect, it’s possible that these benefits are slightly exaggerated in the popular press. Nevertheless, the general trend of the evidence appears to be fairly clear.
It’s difficult to ignore how unremarkable everything seems to Bart as he drifts back to his toys, going from a Dutch instruction to an English protest in about four seconds. He’s not giving a performance. He is merely speaking. And that might prove to be the most common skill of all in a nation where the soundtrack of a typical school hallway now includes dozens of languages on any given morning.
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