Got three languages and a sense of adventure? Then you're a Londoner

In our polyglot capital, increasing numbers of families now converse in several tongues, giving rise to a new generation of trilingual toddlers. Anne McElvoy reports on a major talking point
24 October 2013

In a country often slated for its monolingualism, London is emerging as a hub not only of suave bilinguals, switching between French and English in South Ken cafés, but a new polyglot breed: the capital’s trilinguals. The city’s global pull has turned them from a marginal group to an established tribe, who search for au pairs with three languages (a niche on Gumtree) and plan for schooling to keep their children’s spoken skills intact, while adding a couple more later for good measure to top up their International Baccalaureate.

Strictly speaking, trilingualism means two languages spoken at home and another (usually of the host country) outside. It comes easiest to, for example, Franco-German parents bringing up children in London — whose status as a financial hub has helped spawn many of the new breed. And globalisation has its romantic side, which ends up increasing the number of trilingual families. In the past few months, I’ve met Svetlana, a native of St Petersburg, married to a Spanish husband, whose children switch effortlessly between parental languages and back to English when they head off to school.

Over at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in Mayfair, Helène Pfeil, a twenty-something educated in Strasbourg in French and German, organises high-level conferences in fluent English. She grew up speaking German to her father and French to her mother and sat her school-leaving exam in the French and German systems. She says she thinks mainly in French but dreams in all three languages. The main advantage of a background in different languages, she thinks, is that it breeds a natural appetite to pick up more: she’s also learned some Chinese and is trying out Slovak, which her boyfriend speaks.

As well as recent incomers there are also many "heritage" trilinguals such as the Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg’s family. He speaks Dutch with his relatives, a mixture of Spanish and English with his wife and children and has a Spanish-speaking au pair. (A UN job shouldn’t be a problem if the coalition thing doesn’t work out next time.)

London’s Spaniards seem particularly undaunted by multilingualism. At my daughter’s music class, one of the long-suffering music-mamas, Ana, a lawyer from the Canaries, is married to an Englishman. Bilingualism being the natural state of affairs at home, they decided to send their daughter to the German school in Richmond, which meant that her primary education was conducted in a language neither of her parents know. That might be too daunting for many of us but has produced one of the more organised examples of a London teenager used to assessing her own end-of-term reports and filling in her own admin forms.

A sense of adventure and an expectation of challenge seem to come naturally to trilinguals: one of the reasons they tend to be high-fliers. Companies love them, because they are so much easier to send abroad, and fret less about how well their children will fit in. So more of the British-backed international schools now try to cater for third and fourth languages to maximise flexibility, whether the next move is to Nanjing or Madrid.

But our rigid way of teaching languages doesn’t help. There’s now strong evidence that the way to get and retain fluency in more than one language is by teaching other academic subjects in foreign languages, to widen the vocab base and familiarity. That’s still a rarity in British schools, which isolate languages as a subject in themselves and then wonder why pupils aren’t at ease in them.

London’s long history of linguistic and cultural diversity means that it also boasts lots of less high-rolling trilinguals for whom the Tower of Babel is just everyday life. My children have spent school holidays with a friend who is Greek Cypriot, with a Turkish husband, watching Turkish TV, listening to recipe instructions in Greek and somehow emerging with intact English and a smattering of the other two languages. My friend’s daughter studied international relations (you might say she had a head start) and has married a Japanese national, so their small boy is nicely geared up for four-way chatter.

Parents sometimes fret about children becoming confused when a number of languages are on the go and trilingual children are prone to what the language analysts call “code-shifting”: dropping words from another language into a sentence. But this is often more about convenience than confusion. When I met Natasha Randall, a Russian interpreter living in Tiblisi a couple of years ago, her baby son babbled in his native Georgian. With the family settled in London, she says it is hard to keep him speaking the language.

“There is a serious economy to children’s minds,” she says. “They know what will get the results faster.” How the brain adapts to communicating in three ways has become a relatively new area of academic study. For one thing, writes Susanne Barron-Hauwaert, a researcher on the experiences of trilingual families, “it is very different from bilingualism since the three languages can’t be balanced in the way two are”.

Once schooling starts though, children change their first language quickly to that of their schoolmates, so the local tends to win out as the strongest language. It is apparently unusual to speak (let alone write) three languages with equal fluency: a bit like the triathlon, one element tends to lag a bit, though the level can still be high if all the languages continue in use.

Another factor is an informal pecking order which means that “prestige languages” associated with economic success or global mobility tend to win out in three-language families over minority ones. Yet what counts as prestige can change fast. The usefulness of Russian and Mandarin now means that parents will try to ensure their children’s fluency in them, whereas families like Mr Clegg’s, whose grandmother was Russian, often emphasised Western European languages instead.

What about the rest of us who failed to have the foresight to marry a foreigner and hire a multilingual au pair? As a linguist by background, I have so far done a pretty poor job of imparting languages to my offspring outside the fairly minimal requirements of the school curriculum. But we can at least introduce a bit of multilingualism by getting smaller children used to watching foreign films and learning a few phrases using the subtitles as a dictionary. Like pretty much everything to do with languages, it is all easier the earlier you get going and the more habitual it becomes.

Something I’ve learned about multilingualism is that it is rarely wasted. When I arrived back from Russia in the Nineties, I was still surprised to encounter Russian spoken in London. Now it allows some of the most interesting eavesdropping in the capital, and a straw poll at the parties at the Frieze art shindig found Russian and German were the most common languages for art chatter after English. Mandarin may soon catch up and Japanese return to fashion if that country gets out of its economic doldrums.

Once you’ve acquired trilingualism, of course, you will not want to restrict languages to Asia and Europe. A globetrotting colleague passing through Heathrow noticed an elderly woman vainly trying to communicate with a welter of officials addressing her in various European tongues. He ventured a sentence in Swahili, which he’d picked up as a child in Africa. It worked a treat. After all, London is the home of the adventurous Colonel Pickering just as much as that perfectly-spoken Anglo-snob, Professor Higgins.

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