BANGLADESH is the motherland of the
International Mother Language Day. English is widely used in this country
because of its colonial history. There are some people here who speak Urdu and
there are also many indigenous languages.
This
multilingual condition is a blessing for us. Globalisation demands and speeds
up the process of becoming multilingual citizens. Many cities have people who
can speak in more than one language. The number of bilingual and even
trilingual people is rising day by day. And there is the increasing economic
pressure to keep it rising on.
Bilingualism
has multifaceted benefits: economic, cultural, cognitive and even medical.
Ellen Bialystok's research work has brought the discussion about the benefits
of bilingualism to the forefront for nearly a decade. She is a cognitive
neuroscientist and professor of psychology at York University in Toronto,
Canada. She engaged herself in research studying the effects of a second
language acquisition on school children. There was a startling finding out of a
simple question to children.
The
children were asked if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct:
"Apples grow on noses." Monolingual children couldn't answer. They'd
say: "That's silly" and they'd stop. But bilingual children would
say: "It's silly, but it's grammatically correct." They found that
bilinguals manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to
important information and ignore the less important. ("The Bilingual
Advantage, Interview by Claudia Dreifus," The New York Times, May 30,
2011).
In a
2004 study, published in the Psychology and Aging, Ellen Bialystok and Michelle
Martin-Rhee asked bilingual and monolingual preschoolers to sort blue circles
and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins -- one
marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. They found
that "individuals who grew up speaking two languages and continue to do so
performed significantly better on a variety of simple cognitive tasks than
people who speak only one. Furthermore, the differences between the two groups
increased with age, leading her to hypothesise that knowing and using two
languages inhibits the mind's decline." ("Biligualism may protect the
mind from deterioration in old age," The Economist, June 17, 2004).
In a
2009 study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced
Studies in Trieste, Italy, found that some aspects of the cognitive development
of infants raised in a bilingual household undergoes acceleration in order to
manage whichever of the two languages they are dealing with. ("Bilingual
babies are precocious decision-makers," The Economist, April 16, 2009)
In
their next studies, Ellen Bialystok's team looked at the medical records of 400
Alzheimer's patients. "On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer's
symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This
didn't mean that the bilinguals didn't have Alzheimer's. It meant that as the
disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a
higher level." (Interview by Claudia Dreifus).
This is
supported by another study carried out by Judith Kroll, a psychologist at Penn
State University. It found that "speaking more than one language keeps the
brain in shape and bolsters mental function." ("Being bilingual may
delay Alzheimer's and boost brain power," Alok Jha, The Guardian, February
18, 2011).
All
this is on the medical front, but bilinguals reap benefits on the economic
front too. Economics professors Louis Christofides and Robert Swidinsky found
that men in Quebec, Canada, who can speak both official languages, English and
French, earn an average income 7% higher than those who speak only French, and
bilingual women in Quebec earn 8% more. ("Bilingualism pays, study
finds," by Wency Leung, The Globe and Mail, August 30, 2010).
Bilingual
benefits fall on the cultural front too, as Wency Leung wrote in the same
report: "Dr. Christofides says employers may be willing to pay workers
extra simply for knowing a second language because bilingualism is associated
with other attributes, such as a proclivity for education, cultural sensitivity
or sophistication."
In a
study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on
monitoring tasks, Mr. Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu
Fabra in Spain, and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only
performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain
involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it. Again,
"in a recent study of 44 elderly Spanish-English bilinguals, scientists
led by the neuropsychologist Tamar Gollan of the University of California, San
Diego, found that individuals with a higher degree of bilingualism -- measured
through a comparative evaluation of proficiency in each language -- were more
resistant than others to the onset of dementia and other symptoms of
Alzheimer's disease." ("Why Bilinguals Are Smarter," by Yudhijit
Bhattacharjee, The New York Times, March 17, 2012).
The
government of Bangladesh should adopt a right language policy. We must avoid
the policy of the one-sided emphasis of learning only English as a second
language. Let Bangladesh be a land where one can hear all major languages in
the world. This will increase foreign investment and tourism. It will also make
it easy for our people to move around the world and have a better job than they
are doing now. The money spent by the government for this will be returned
being many times. People of Bangladesh will be smarter physically, economically
and culturally. The Bangla language will reach a new height of beauty and
enrichment by having its speakers got into touch with other languages in the
world.
Alamgir
Khan
The
writer is Programme Manager, Research and Development Collective (RDC).
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