Multilinguism is good for a person

To put it bluntly, bilingualism is often seen as "good" when it"s rich English speakers adding a language as a hobby or another international language, but "bad when it involves poor, minority, or indigenous groups adding English to their first language, even when the same two languages are involved. Here is a piece about the value of bilingualism for all students. Bowern is an associate professor of linguistics at Yale University and a fellow in The OpEd Project"s Public Voices project who has been researching topics s related to language and society, including bilingualism, for 15 years. She also works as an advisor to Native American and Australian indigenous groups on language reclamation, maintenance, and bilingual education issues. Two languages, two sets of opinion about bilingualism. On the one side is the research that consistently shows that bilingualism is good for you. It leads to an enriched set of experiences, a new way of seeing the world, and more prosaically but no less importantly, is associated with reduced rates of dementia. People who are multilingual are perceived as more intelligent and educated, and they have better international contacts and resources in their careers. On the other side, we also hear about the perniciousness of bilingualism among immigrants, the uselessness of supporting and preserving minority and indigenous languages, and the educational and economic harm that comes from "wasting" valuable resources on bilingual education initiatives. Some even see maintaining another language as seditious, a compromise to national security, or at the very least, evidence of conflicted loyalties or identities, or that a person cannot be fully trusted. These opposing views tells us more about stereotypes and social pigeonholing than about language. To put it bluntly, bilingualism is often seen as "good" when it"s rich English speakers adding a language as a hobby or another international language, but "bad" when it involves poor, minority, or indigenous groups adding English to their first language, even when the same two languages are involved. CONTENT FROM PRUDENTIAL Defying millennial stereotypes Young Americans still know the value of hard work and are driven to help others. Watch one 18-year-old's story. You may have heard the joke: "What do you call someone who speaks two languages? (Bilingual) Someone who speaks three languages? (Trilingual) Someone who speaks one language? American." But America is a multilingual national, with 55 million Americans speaking another language at home, and nearly 400 languages represented. And far from being unusual outside the United States, multilingualism is the norm with 163 of the world"s 195 countries officially bi- or multilingual. More than half the world"s population uses more than one language. Let"s look in more detail at the evidence that bilingualism is "good." The evidence comes from several sources. One is Erika Hoff"s work on second language exposure. She compared Spanish-speaking immigrants to the USA who spoke Spanish to their children with those who spoken mostly English to them. The children who had mostly English at home did worse in standardized tests, while the children whose parents spoke to them mostly in Spanish benefited from a "bilingual boost" by being proficient in two languages. Research in Australia among Aboriginal groups shows that bilingual education programs have higher school attendance and better outcomes on standardized tests. The same is true for the elite bilingual schools at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum. Bilingual education benefits all, not just the rich. The "bilingual boost" extends beyond the classroom and into later life. Ellen Bialystok"s research, for example, shows that bilingual adults, as they get older, stay sharper for longer than monolingual adults do. The effect is about four years" difference on average, which can make a considerable difference to quality of life in retirement. In research by the same team, bilingual adults also showed the delays in the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer"s Disease. They still got the disease, but they were able to maintain active lifestyles for longer " 5 to 6 years longer on average.