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Raising young children can sometimes be hard, even more so when your child is bilingual. You think your teaching him a lesson about good behaviour, but before you know it you find yourself in the midst of a metalinguistic discussion. The other day I tried to explain to my son that he cannot bother other people. In Italian, this sounds like: `non devi fare i dispetti a nessuno´ (literally, you cannot bother nobody). Notice the two italicised words because they are important. His response was a surprise to me. ‘Oh mama, so you mean that I should bother someone!’ As a parent, I was slightly taken aback for a while. As a linguist, I was on cloud nine. And he went on to explain that if you say non (not) and nessuno (nobody), you actually mean someone. If I wanted him not to bother anyone, I should have said ‘devi fare i dispetti a nessuno´, with only one negative.
Sceptics will undoubtedly see this as evidence for language confusion. I was marvelled at the clarity with which a seven-year-old child explained a logic-formula. And I ensure you, despite the love that I harbour for my occupation, I have never talked to my son about negative concord!
This example shows that children don’t learn language by imitating adults. They really adapt the linguistic input that they get. They analyse what comes in, they discover patterns, they make generalisations and they keep reflecting on language. This is what monolingual children do. Children that grow up with more than one language develop this language instinct even further. They switch effortlessly from one language to the other and sometimes the they even step ‘away’ from them, discovering all kinds of connections and talking about them.
My son will soon enough discover that Italian allows for double negation, whereas Dutch does not. I’m not worried at all about his metalinguistic capacities. But how about bothering people? Can he not bother someone or can he bother no one… which one was it again? And in which language?
PS Do you want to learn more about how children learn language and about language in general? Read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker: highly recommended!
