Bilingualism and the Brain: Dr. Thomas H Bak on Language Networks & Lifelong Learning Benefits

[00:00:01]hello everybody welcome to raising multilinguals live my name is tetsu young and i am from asktetsu and hello my name is rita rosenbach i am from multilingualparenting.com very be very welcome to tonight's really interesting session and hello my name is utterly majoribot from utis international lounge and we are very honored to welcome dr thomas back as our guest today welcome tomas well thank you very much for the invitation my pleasure yes and thomas please allow me to quickly introduce you um thomas was born and raised in krakow poland he studied medicine and worked as clinician in psychiatry and neurology in berlin cambridge and edinburgh since his doctorate on aphasia language disorders caused by brain diseases his main interest has been the relationship between language brain and mind he is working at the department of psychology the center of clinical brain science and the center of cognitive aging and cognitive epidemiologic epidemiology here at the university of edinburgh from 2010 to 2018 he was also the president of the world federation of neurology research group on aphasia dementia and cognitive disorders he's also co-founder of the healthy linguistic diet with uh dr dina bergovic smith who we interviewed in the second session two weeks ago so thomas today's topic is bilingualism in the brain so when we think about the brain uh and those who maybe uh have read something about this there is the assumption that there are very classical uh language areas in the brain but can you maybe um tell us where the language is stored in the brain and yes if there is any codependency on when we learn a language if there is another part of the brain where the language is stored or activated in the brain when we learn them the languages at an early stage or a later stage well thanks very much for the question uh i mean i would like to kind of get a step back before answering it for reasons which i think will become always in a moment because over the last couple of decades we had a fundamental change in our understanding of the brain so when i was doing my phd the kind of usual metaphor which i think still many people kind of believe in is brain like a chest of drawers so you have here you have the socks here you have the t-shirts here you have you know other things and the problem is kind of intuitively very convincing and we know that there is a specialization in the brain there are special areas and so on but the problem is that you have this idea of kind of limited space in which you try to put things in and that was really the predominant way modularism in which brain was conceptualized in the 80s or so i mean maybe in up to 90s now we shift it completely to seeing brain as a kind of giant network or in fact set of different networks so it's not a single place there are different places which then jointly produce the activity get involved now why is it fundamentally important firstly because it means that we are not looking now for a special place in the brain but for networks with different places being involved but secondly the first model found it very difficult to accommodate language because then the question was you know which drawer is it in so do you have them two languages in the same drawer they must be kind of pushing each other or maybe you go into another drawer and there's no space you know for mass or whatever now if you have network you have exactly the opposite if you add another line thread to a net and that becomes stronger and not weaker so adding languages stabilizes the language system and makes it more robust rather than pushing one or the other away so that's why this change has been so important and we know now that language really you know activates a lot of different networks in the brain so in a way i mean probably half of the brain will be active when you hear a word single producing something and so on coming to your second question about the age it does matter because it seems that if languages are learned very early they are the networks are almost overlapping they are very very similar if the language is learned a little bit later it seems to be slightly more distributed between left and right side of the brain i mean usually we have left-sided left-sided dominance this is something which again the pendulum in science was going in both directions so there was a time where people really believed you know first language here second language there then it was said well it's complete rubbish and now we came back well there is something about it but it's not as simple so from this point of view i mean there is a difference in lateralization with later land languages and this can become later important when we're speaking about about different diseases for instance because in fact having a little bit of language on the other side of the brain might be helpful in the recovery of aphasia okay so if i understand you're right so if i learn for example italian at an early stage and then i add german later on they might be distributed in two different areas of my brain or activated in different areas of my brain at that point but will yes change if then i learn more about both languages would they not be like uh closer together at some point and maybe even overlapping well i think we have to distinguish here the kind of functional and anatomical point of view the point is not all cells in the same area of the brain are always doing the same job there is a specialization that's a relative one you can have an area in the brain you know we are not in our imaging we cannot really go to the level of single cells so the fact that a certain area of you know let's say one square centimeter is active doesn't mean that this area all cells are doing the same job it's like imagine a you know a big tower with offices and a lot of people working there but in fact they could be part of different companies doing different jobs and so from this point of view i think we need to move away from this idea of the kind of you know specificity what you have is you will have quite a lot of overlapping system across languages and there is a lot of evidence showing that if you speak more than one language all of them are active in our brain whatever we speak so when i'm speaking english now still my polish german and spanish are being so to say active in the background and uh so there's a good evidence for that and that's where the whole idea of the kind of control mechanisms executive functions okay that bilinguals have always to kind of be able to switch to activate this activate and so on and so on but as i say it's not so you have clearly overlapping areas so-called broca and and wernicke area and so on but you have also the networks going so to say into other parts of the brain so it's more i would say it's more rather than area i would say there are maybe the language headquarters which are so to say in these two places but they have their so to say other parts all across the brain perfect and um another question would be what is the importance of the main or preferred language or if we want to call it mother tongue or l1 so chronologically speaking the first language that we that we learned or acquired when considering the whole lifespan you see this question will be very differently answered whether we take the first or the second metaphor of the brain so in a way in the static view that we had let's say 40 years ago when i was doing my phd in this static view of fact 30 uh the you know once you have the first language is there it's for always it's kind of uh um how do you say it's kind of always like you know first language first love is always there and so on and then everything coming later is inferior but in fact if we take a dynamic view and particularly if you put it together with what we have now as a pattern of people moving across different countries studying in a different language and is their first language then working in a different language than they studied then maybe marrying someone who speaks a different language all of this by the way is stick for me so then you end up in a moment where it's very difficult to say what is in fact the main language and i would say in you know one of the you know of the papers that i wrote with dinner begovice whom you had you know two weeks ago with whom i work on this has a cognitive necessity linguistic diet is that we both like the notion of plurilingualism which is very popular i mean very much uh promoted by european commission european union and the idea is that in a way there is this kind of all languages together so i would say almost as a definition of prior lingualism it's someone for whom it's impossible to say what is the main language because there can be one language which is particularly good for expressing emotions in other more for you know professional work and so on and so on that's exactly what we were talking about i think uh a few minutes ago um another question would be what level of fluency in another language is based on your knowledge necessary to gain what is called the bilingual advantage maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this well i mean that is a question i'm extremely interested in and i would say that that is a question in which my background in medicine very much determines the way i am thinking about it namely in medicine we know that even if a certain drug let's say has a positive effect we have to know how much of it to take how often and so long i mean if you take antibiotics but you take only one quarter of the dose you will not really get rid of your infection so from this and this is something which i think is very often forgotten in the literature on values we still need a lot of research this question i mean there are a lot of studies and some of them use like you know two lessons a week some of them three some four some of them you know only one and then people make you know big judgments oh it works or it doesn't work it will probably depend on the dolls so let's say out of the research i've done so far i would probably say that the border might be somewhere around uh four five hours a week so let's say you know one one lesson of two hours a week if people don't really do extra won't really have much effect we know that intensive courses even for one week have effect and we know now from other studies that let's say three three times two hours six hours a week have an effect as well so two is clearly not enough six is probably enough it needs to be somewhere in between but as i say it's not a very popular research because people very often want to have a kind of you know decision yes or no but as i say for for a medic it's obvious that it depends the dose determines what effect you will get it's like with physical exercise i mean if you go to the gym once a month you will not be terribly fit so if you cannot compare things unless you look so to say at the so to say what we would call the kind of those response curve yes this this nicely links to our previous session with dina where she was mentioning the five episodes of language a day or yes um throughout the the week where we activate the different languages that are we or our children are learning yeah um absolutely maybe just to link it to your first question this also very very much relates the static versus dynamic view so in a static view you have your l1 you learn it you have it for life but we know that's not the case if you don't use your first language for the next you know 40 from 50 years then you become almost like a functional monolingual so from the there's quite a lot of work on attrition and so on so from my point of view it's much more the practice which matters than the perfection of the order okay so this is actually in great uh connection with my next question that is actually if it would surface for us to learn a language in our early years like many parents are focusing mostly on the first years um to pass on their languages and to foster multiple languages in young children or younger children but what is suffice for us to learn another language in their early years to help us for example delay the onset of dementia or be helpful with whatever brain damage we we may encounter later well i would say i am a great i i think in this case i believe very much in practice i think as i say for the reasons which i was trying to explain with this uh switch from the static to dynamic view practice really matters i mean again to bring i told you i always like either metaphors from diet or the metaphors some physical exercise so if we let's say say swimming is healthy it doesn't mean whether i mean if i have beautiful crawl and perfect movements and never go swimming it will not really help my house but if i go swimming regularly i might not have my perfect movements but it will still have an effect so from this point of view i see things much more through the prism of practice than of some kind of abstract knowledge and then really it matters how much we do it and that is connected with this idea of cognitive reserve that basically practicing different languages is this permanent cognitive exercise going back to when you say that like four or five hours a week would be would be good and um like two hours a week is not really enough so when we transfer this to a school setting and especially in in the uk there's less and less foreign languages at school there is no way not enough emphasis so what would you say would it then be perhaps better to efficiently have many hours on a shorter period or or because as a matter of fact we know that one hour a week children do not have confident speakers i would say anything is better than nothing but as i say we have to be realistic in our expectations so there is for instance very nice work i don't know if someone that you kind of invited or will invite in future florence miles from from colchester university of essex was kind of making a very nice point that children will not learn a language just because they have you know an hour or two early on but those children who were exposed to a second language early will have much more positive attitude and they're much more likely to learn another language later on so from this point of view you are you know you might not reach big you know effect but you are putting a kind of a seed of curiosity and positive attitude which then later on might very much lead to it so i think we have to we have to look also at the kind of long term attitudinal con and and i'm glad about this question because one of the things which i kind of miss a little bit in a lot of current research is that the field of cognitive science in the field let's say of sociolinguistics are very very disparate and there's hardly any communication between them but in fact we should see it together so let's say i could say maybe you know this kind of little bit at school in the beginning is not enough to establish cognitive effects but if it's enough to establish an attitude that will make the person then ten years later go to university and learn a language then the investment works worse do it so i think we have to bring together the psycholinguistic and medical and neuroscientific and the sociolinguistic aspects yes so to build on that well i've always thought that if you start with a language it is very important to make it fun and interesting to start with and even try to gain some kind of aha experiences or that i can do this and that would even with a little bit of that we would reach the effect that you just you just mentioned absolutely so from this point of view i would say you know it's not i wouldn't say oh well two weeks two hours is you know means that it's lost time but as i say we shouldn't also have realistic expectations so two hours a week will not make a child you know flaw or an adult for that matter you know a fluent speaker of you know in our language well if if i'm if i may uh play a little bit of a devil's advocate here because i when p parents talk to me about uh you know when should i start i i always advocate as early as possible and obviously i i am fully aligned with you guys talking about attitude you know this uh building in languages before pride and other psychological barriers are built but i also saw this this well i learned recently that the brain development is very very active during the first few years of life and the your brain is built up to about 90 of the adult brain by age six or so so i always like to talk about okay i don't know of any data per se pertaining to languages but if all sorts of you know development occurs at this stage i think if you're building a house the best time to put in all the pipings of the house to make it a good finish is at the beginning you know rather than reform you know re reconstruction later which can be done but it's more costly so if you want if you know you want to do two languages or three languages the best time to do it is probably at the very early stages so that's so i'd like to know if from a medical perspective at least a physiological perspective is this true or is there a very good you know real developmental advantage to do it early to learn these languages you know i think we have therefore yeah no it's an ex excellent question but i think it depends completely of what you want to achieve and now again let me let me give an example a metaphor from physical exercise if you want your child to win wimbledon i think it's a good idea to make her or him play tennis very early or if you want your child to become you know a concert musician you know playing saxophone carnegie hall then probably an early start is good but if for instance you want to stay healthy across your lifespan then i ask the question back to you imagine two people one of them who was an incredibly good sport man maybe even one wimbledon 180 29 and then from thirty didn't have any movement whatsoever spent the rest the second half of the life on the sofa watching tv and the dbr and imagine a second person who was incredibly unsporty for the first 30 years and then we certainly took up tennis never won anything but was playing twice a week which of those people do you think will be healthier age 60 absolutely agree it's the second person not for sure you want to speak a language like a native a problematic term anyway that would be a topic for another discussion i think native speaker is a very you know a very very problematic issue but many people have this ideal if you want to pass or to say as you know someone who grew up there and so on then of course the earlier you do it the better no question but if you see languages really as a as an exercise of the mind then i would say every age has its advantages in some way i would even say the later the more important because your old age will be determined very much by your activities during you know second half of your life so it depends what the goal is what what is the best solution that's why i say you know the best thing is always one language early one late no i i agree thank you for for your answer yeah i i always say on the safe side i always say if you start early you still have a chance to do it late but if you start late you'll never have the chance to start early so it's absolutely clear so but before we continue this this is you know absolutely you know a fantastic discussion and all our uh audience is is nodding i think in agreement right now and i'd like to first acknowledge everybody who's watching right now we've got lots of questions that are coming up your way thomas so so uh hang on tight but definitely just a hello to everybody you know we have josie we have clinio we have maria we have anna we have karina and michelle and i must be missing people who have not commented i don't know but we've got you know loads of people who are watching right now so you're a very popular guy thomas thanks that's here so we we have a few questions uh but do we want to maybe take one from the crowd right now we have time reserved for the crowd later uh so you know definitely you guys we will get to your questions no no doubt uh what do you guys think uh utah and rita should we take one from the from the crowd yes i think uh we can add ours at the end of theirs okay yes definitely we want the people to to participate yes so yeah um i'll i'll go i'll go so clinio tony welcome to neo uh tony so he's asking could i say that non-native violin non-native okay let's not go into the discussion about the native but non-native bilingual parenting might have the same effect than native bilingual parenting when it comes to cognitive reserve based on the idea of practicing the the the language uh over over mastering of the language yeah uh that's that's a very very good but i would say quite a difficult question uh i mean firstly that is something that happens you know all the time that uh children i mean let's say in a lot of countries and a lot of places a lot of families children grow up with parents speaking not their native tongue with them for instance maybe because they live abroad or maybe that's not the language they speak with their partner because the partner doesn't speak the language and so on so on however usually they will have also access to other speakers of that language and generally in order to learn the language it's good to have as many different speakers as possible not just one person so from this point of view if the parents speak something which they it's not their native language but the children also have access to other speakers of that language this is not a big problem if they are the only source then it becomes more difficult but that's that's true by the way also for language learning at any age and so on it's good language is something which is a lot of variation within the same language we know we'll have you know i mean women might have a different register than men and already even acoustically and so on we know that people from different you know social groups and so on might use different vocabulary different grammar so we learn very very fast and there is a variation a normal healthy variation diversity within a language and that's why i think in a way it would work much better if the child has that access to more speakers and not just their parents doing this i mean i realized that in many places in the world now a lot of parents try to speak english with their kids because they think that will be kind of terribly uh you know that will bring them terribly forward uh sometimes it can have exactly the opposite effect so a colleague of mine in singapore's styles and a very interesting i mean stubby looking that the children where the parents were speaking well chinese speakers that were speaking english at home they have got not at no advantage speaking english because they landed school anyway but they have a disadvantage and in chinese so from this point of view it's really it's something where i would say i would look at the whole picture i would look at the the surrounding i would look also at the you know whether there's really an emotional collect connection with the language or whether this is just an exercise because you know i want my trend to learn and so on so there is no really one single so to see correct answer to this i mean really depends on the circumstances yes uh if i may there is a question that that links to what you just said thomas from anna it's a long question i let me please read it to you dear oh my son is nearly one and a half years old we live in serbia i speak with him in german i'm a german language professor doing a phd in a field of bilingual curriculums and i'm always aware of the advantages of raising a multilingual child and my supportive husband speaks with him in serbian he doesn't speak german yesterday our pediatrician seriously disturbed me by telling me i should stop speaking to my son in german because it poses a danger of him developing selective mutism he hasn't started speaking that yet i notice he understands both languages but i'm suddenly afraid that speaking german to him was a mistake and at the same um at the same afraid of confusing him by switching to serbian at this point what would be the best thing to do now what i've been doing is still met with extreme prejudice from all sides of multilingualism and children as extremely uncommon here adding more weight to the situation and making it all the more difficult to decide on the next step thank you okay uh well i think a very you know and a lot of reflection going into it so you see that this is someone who really you know reflects on things and so on so one point is i mean absolutely it seems that in the surrounding this person has a lot of prejudice and a lot of you know lack of knowledge about liquids the idea that children get confused is basically a monolingual myth i mean you know monolinguals always think that you know there's only one language and if you get more than one you get confused but it's a little bit hard to say you know i mean if you see everything only in black and white then you find color confusing so there is no children can distinguish languages practically i mean there are some studies showing even in the utero definitely the moment they are born the idea that children will not know that this is a different language is absolutely absolutely naive so from this point of view there is a i think there's a lot of prejudice and i can understand that it's difficult to kind of get it through in terms of to say keeping german it would be then good to have more sources than than so i would definitely continue with german but i would look maybe for instance there are a lot of you know on tablets and so on there are a lot of german games german children's song and so on so on so that the child gets input and realizes it's not just this kind of funny language that only one person in the world namely my mother speaks but that there is a lot of other things and other children's playing and so on so on i think you know i realized that it's not easy but i think it would be probably best to continue particularly if the husband is supportive i mean this i mean the most important thing is really the immediate family unfortunately the wider society in many places is still very very hostile to very good yes i think this relates quit pretty much on uh what you also mentioned in one of the conferences that you held i think at the beginning of the year um where you said also multilingualism is the ideology of fear right so the idea is always that there is some it's something dangerous it's something that you know you will and absolutely but i think that's it it's a question where you know the kind of cognitive and social sciences should see it you know should come together because a lot of prejudices against bilingualism are addressed in pseudocognitive arguments all the child gets confused but in fact it's about the social otherness so you have basically a social fear being presented it's a pseudo-cognitive argument by people who usually don't have much experience with cognitive science i would like to just address anna directly um a bit more please do join um online groups like auto runs her group i have my group and and that's where his group there you will find a lot of other parents who have been in the same situation as you and it's always good to to get their their boost from other parents and because yeah i feel for you i know that this is a difficult situation but i completely agree and we all completely agree that you should continue with the german and that the pediatrician is actually not qualified to comment on on on this yes there is another question from michelle thank you for your interesting discussion what are your views on the concept of language hybridity and language repertoires as opposed to the idea of two or more separate languages how many hours do you give me to answer five minutes yes so i would say they are kind of well you can take a very scientific debate view on that or you can take a kind of common sense view so um very often and and i was trying to show it also in the beginning very often there is a kind of pendulum in the history of ideas that you know we go through an idea and then we go to the other extreme and go back to the other i mean i was giving an example that you know we thought all language is always in the left hemisphere then there was the idea oh no the new one is on the right and then even back and something like this happens with languages as well so there was a long time where let's say mixing languages was considered to be completely you know taboo and the idea was you should only speak one language and for instance you know one parent one language opel policy and never to mix and you know if you're at school you can only speak this language and so on so on so there was almost a fear and i think this fear was probably also by projecting a monolingual frame of mind onto a bilingual or multilingual child with the idea that you know if you hear you know two people speaking two different languages then you get confused i would say now we probably move to the other extreme where let's say you know dense code switching trans languaging and so on is being almost idolatrized where you know there is the idea there is no such thing as language everybody of us has a you know has a mixture of uh you know of things and then you know we should use it now the point is it won't work very well because not everybody is having exactly the same combination of languages and that is something which kids work very very fast i mean my daughter you know by three and three and a half she knew exactly who spoke which languages and in fact who spoke them well or not well when she would say oh well so he speaks you know the friend of hers he speaks spanish the mom as well and daddy tries to speak spanish because that is english and trying you know to learn from spanish and so on so kids learn very very fast so to say that and let's say when she went to speak with a grandmother then you know it had to be spanish because the grandmother would not speak any uh any other language so from this point of view i think you know i try to do a kind of middle view so on one hand i don't think we should have this you know panic fear of mixing languages and it's very natural in a multilingual surrounding particularly if you have all people having the same combination of languages that you mix them because you just use the term coming and so on so on that's absolutely fine but i would still say unless every speaker of that language also speaks the other language it's good to be able to speak that language so let's say if i live in miami i can probably mix spanish and and english all the time and most people understand it but let's say if i go to london maybe speaking english might be a better view and if i go let's say to buenos aires or to you know a santiago de chile then maybe speaking spanish would be a better idea so from this point of view i think i i see myself a little bit in the middle between these kind of two extremes yes we have more questions well so well we still have two questions that we had you know one that we wanted to continue with the interview but uh definitely people please continue to write your questions into the into the chat box we will get to them uh let's continue with what was our next question if we don't get to them during this live session then what we will do we will be online and we will be answering questions and um in comments as well absolutely i actually would like to change one of the questions that we had because thomas before you said it is important to keep learning or keep improving our languages across the lifespan and i was wondering is there any difference if for example i speak all kind of romance languages that i do this until the end let's say when i'm 90 or something is there any difference uh on on yes the physiological part would it be more beneficial for my brain to learn to to challenge a little bit more my brain so to say by learning a language that is not in parented with french portuguese romance romanian et cetera like korean yeah that's a very interesting question oh yeah it's a fascinating question uh however obviously not very uneasy to answer for at least two reasons one is that determining so to say what we call linguistic distance is not banal uh very often people use linguistic distance on what languages come from but in a way it doesn't really matter what matters the language spoke nowadays and then you have very different things let's say for phonology for vocabulary or for or for a grammar so let me give you a very practical example one of the kind of famous multilingual countries in europe spain everybody would tell that you know spanish and catalan are closely related and spanish and basque are completely different and that is correct in terms of grammar that is correct in terms of vocabulary to a large extent but in terms of phonology basque is much more similar to spanish than catalanis because a lot of sounds which spanish speakers find difficult whereas the sounds landscape of at least the kind of spanish basque is very very similar to spam to spanish so from this point of view the question is is it really so to say if you mix and learn is it more about the sound or more about the words and i found myself personally interestingly that when i give talks in different languages for instance my spanish interferes more with my italian with my portuguese which is surprising in terms of grammar and vocabulary but not so surprising of phonology which is completely different portuguese so in a way the moment you hear a sound it's clearly different portuguese whereas italian and spanish have much more much more of an overlap so that's one point so we don't really know what are the kind of main factors we have to pay attention to is it the sound the phonology is it the vocabulary cognates and so on or is it is it the grammar but the second point even more fundamentally is we don't know whether to say it's better or worse to have different or similar languages so you can say okay if a language is very different you have a different frame of mind you might have a different word order you have to put everything you know in the end of the sentence or you have an agglutinating language where you have you know the kind of suffixes instead of prefixes and so on and so on so that gives you a kind of different frame of mind however the danger of mixing such two languages is not terribly big so i mean if you speak english and chinese you will usually not mix them but on the other hand if you speak two languages are very very close related you have to pay much more attention because it's very easy to put a word of a language into the other one so let's say when i speak english and i'm going to get tired i would usually put in german words rather than spanish or polish because they are very similar in a way they could quite well function in this sentence so from this point of view if you look from the point of view of kind of keeping attention then having two languages which are close together is a very very good so to say exercise so again like before i would say my answer is have both there are one language which is very similar to yours and one is completely different and then you're on a safe side thank you fantastic um one question i i am a proud grandmother of two small children women contributing to this swedish learning swedish here in the in the uk and i get questions from because now there are more and more multi-lingual multicultural families so uh grandparents sometimes find themselves in themselves in a situation where they do not speak the first language that their grandchild learns and i i often get questions or worried grandparents say what should i do i am too old to learn this language what would you tell these grandpa grandparents thomas well i would say i would give two answers which contradict each other completely here's one yeah so which yes so the first part of the answer is so one is for the tree to the children the other is there to be grandparents to do the grandparents i would say it's never too late i mean one can learn languages also later on of course you will not sound you know like an a you know a native speaker and so on in in uh you know knowing how problematic this term is and but you know i know for a lovely example that i always cite easy and i was really fortunate to meet this person mary hobson an english writer who started learning russian with 56 and did her phd on gribayedov russian poet of 19th century in 75 and then wrote her newest i mean published her newest translation of uh pushpins the kind of one of the main works of russian poetry so i would say you need to know a language relatively well to kind of translate you know the best poetry uh into into your own one so from this point of view it's true never too late but the kind of the other completely contradictory or contradicting part of the answer is i would say why shouldn't the children learn the length of the grandparents so from this point of view i would say the grandparents can be an incredible motivation and here i can think and you know i i have to say it with a clear amount of sadness because my daughter's grandmother just passed away a week ago and which was very very tragic barcelona but the fact that she in fact was clearly a spanish speaker and didn't speak english meant that my daughter knew she had to speak spanish so speaking english was always easy and when she had spanish speakers or polish speakers for that matter who spoke english then she knew oh i can speak english they would understand me but with the granny she had to make an effort because she loved her granny she was making an effort because she wanted to communicate with her so from so that's why i say so i was not joking saying that i'm giving completely contradictory advice so on the one hand the grandparents can probably learn it but maybe for the child it's better if they don't so that the children have a motivation to learn a language because in long term that will be so beneficial for them i wouldn't say contradictory i say complementary yes yeah i mean the point is in fact that's a very interesting question also now you know with a lot of kind of minorities in uk very often parents came here and they you know they wanted to adjust everything and they were not teaching their children the language but then when the children themselves have a language and now think oh maybe they should learn in punjabi or bengali and so on if they are still grandparents that is a brilliant way of so to say overcoming this generation gap and have the grandparents speaking the other language with their grandchildren so that they can learn it giving also grandparents an additional sense of purpose in linguistic terms absolutely and and you are reiterating what we were also saying in different sessions the involvement not only of parents but also the expense extended family and friends and community that is fundamental so to maintain and foster all the languages so the languages of the family that are needed and of the community thomas i think we could talk for hours and explore all the so many different aspects about today's topic and i see that there are more questions on the facebook side maybe we can then uh go over and answer them uh directly but unless our time is limited so no i think i think we should we should let's let's you know the folks did write questions for us let's try our best and go through a few more uh you know and some are not really questions some some are just adding comments to what you have you were saying and you know unfortunately we we couldn't sort of go back and forth with the chat but we definitely want to acknowledge everybody you know karina says i agree that two hours a week isn't enough this was you know about your exercises earlier and you know she agrees as a coordinator in brazilian community we have karina marsh again two hours is not really okay i think it's the same comment here right a lot of people will have the same experience i'm just trying to support you to study systematically and i mean very often you know we know it from experience but it's nice to have an empirical so to say proof of it absolutely absolutely um so she karina has a question leading a brazilian community school with only two hour classes a week i have to say parents uh i have to say to parents that it's crucial that they can carry on that that they carry on exposing their children to the minority language at home i mean i think we all agree yeah but again i mean by the way but in brazil i mean as i say we were speaking about it before the brazil has probably one of the best musics in the world so in a way i mean try to get kids to love brazilian music because then you know automatically they will get language with it so in a way trying to trying to have as many sources i mean songs bring language as well and if a child knows a lot by the way that was the way how i started learning german i mean i spoke only polish although my mother was german but she was singing german songs so i could i knew a lot of specs of songs thomas thomas i'm sure it was beer that got you speaking german right okay yeah so she she wanted your tips up you answered the question uh right on uh what else do we have did were you checking out the questions uh yes uh also nicole and i wanted to tie on to anna's question she mentioned selective mutism as an argument used by the pediatrician to deter her from speaking german what is the connection of selective mutism of being raised bilingual or multilingual i feel to see the direct connection thanks er well i i don't think there's a direct connection i mean there is and even this is a kind of you know complicated on average they are bilingual children sometimes star or often start speaking with later than monolingual ones but then they catch up and all it's only a kind of statistical truth so there are some treating bilingual or trillionaire children who in fact start speaking very much earlier the modern lingual ones so it's not that it's kind of automatic it's trust that if you look let's say it you know thousand here and thousand here you might get a little bit of a couple of months different so it's not really a problem i could only imagine that if the language is connotated with a lot of negative feelings then you can have something like elective mutism if the child notices that the moment where germany spoke everybody is having a negative emotional reaction also but it would not be about the german or any language it would be about the negative reaction of the surrounding and children are of course seeing that so from this point of view i don't think there's any connection to but as i say if there if if any member of community is becoming ostracized because the way they speak or they look or they do and so on this might have consequences for the child so the consequences are not from the language the concepts are from the ostracism well so thank you very much for this answer also i i also personally with my kids i mean i have four kids my first one is eight he you know we do five languages at home and he developed very quickly i mean relatively quickly around almost 20 months or so he was talking and then my daughter was like about eight months later than him almost three years old before she started talking and we were quite worried and and then i was really interested in finding literature on whether more languages does cause delay and i'm always seeing things that say it's not been proven not that it's not not that it's completely disproven but it's no there's no strong evidence um exactly that i mean and if there are any effects they are slow they catch up and as i say the individual differences exactly as you say are much bigger than the difference between modeling and bilingual yeah and also what we need to always keep in mind that we they bilingual chil bilingual child's language deliver development shouldn't be compared to a monolingual standard because it's a different development so so we we shouldn't go down that path of comparing apples with oranges yes but i think also uh talking about selective mutism it's a situation that can happen also to monolingual children for example when they go into school and all of a sudden they feel not very much at ease and they stop speaking the language whereas in other settings they would speak it so it is it has to do with other aspects that like thomas said but we can maybe expand on this on another time uh with okay does thank you for for your answer though he he said he didn't think about that before so he he's very uh thankful for that for your answer yes so thomas would you have some uh closing remarks for us for this session today which was incredibly interesting and as i said before we could talk about this for hours well but is it okay if we take one last one i see one last one we might as well pretty good from sarah who says we move to a new country where we don't speak the language our son is three and soon starting public school i'm wondering if watching cartoons in that particular language can help with learning it watching cartoon watching tv yeah well firstly i would not be worried about the tries not picking up the language i mean the only way you can have a child not picking up the language is to have a child locked in a ghetto where basically there's no exposure to this so the moment where a child plays with other children goes to nursery school and so on they pick up the language whatever the alter the parents speak you see elton i said now german words coming into my team i wouldn't i wouldn't say you the rojitsa for instance the polish word so so from this point of view it's very much uh i i think it's a completely un fear i remember one of my you know best friends in germany from berlin moved with her two sons to america and i remember when she was telling me oh hell and i'm worried you know will they really pick up english and they say well look i'm sure in one year they will correct your english and then i remember when i was visiting them in new york and we're going about you know across the brooklyn bridge and then she said something at columbus day and then both sons really unions and say but mom it's columbus day so immediately they corrected her pronunciation so from this point of view i think you know you don't need neither cartoon nor david so on i would be worried i would never be worried about the dominant language the dominant language always wins the day and as i say the only exceptions are if you have of course a ghetto situation where the child is only living in a kind of you know some area where the language is supposed the dominant language always wins i should be i would be worried about the original language that they speak because the fact that parents speak a language at home doesn't mean that the child will learn it that is the vulnerability fantastic all right well thank you again very much for for your time utah you were going to were you going to talk to thomas maybe the last thing which i would i would say is i always i'm a big fan of twitter so here my twitter handle ph back at ow completely i am i am a fan of twitter is because i can send links and you have heard you know many of you will have heard dina mcmahbegovich speaking two weeks ago about health linguistic diet the website that we have and we have also some papers that are written let's say from a scientific perspective but for general public so with a lot of links to papers to original materials and so on and they are so i usually always kind of tweet them from time to time so that people can have the links so particularly a paper called healthy linguistic diet and another about the um about the multilingualism across the lifetime lifespan and as i say once you get this paper they should be written for a general audience but they have also they have also links to the original paper for those people who really want to kind of go to the sources and and check everything for themselves for those of you who didn't pick up thomas's uh twitter handle we will put it in the comments yes okay thanks a lot yes and we will uh add all the research and the articles that were mentioned in the description of the video on youtube and also here in the comments as well so it is time yes that's why i dropped it again you know it's still before seven so it's uh managed to come we managed to cover quite a big topic you know i would say in one hour with a lot of different aspects of it absolutely yes so so we will uh want to first thank all the everybody watching on the on facebook and and giving us great questions um i do see that you know there are other comments and questions we will not be able to get to them today but we will go through them and answer all of your questions uh over time so thank you everybody again and i will uh put in a link for some feedback if you can please uh take a few minutes give us some feedback on our program on today's session if you've seen other sessions you can also give us some feedback so that link will be in the comment section and in the description i will put it up later okay and then i will now hand over to utah to um for or hang on let me let me show the screen i will hand over to rita for the for to present our next speaker in two weeks oh this is i'm thank you thomas this has been such an exciting episode an interview i just loved it and like you said like we've said we could keep on for hours on this and we will continue on a high because next time in two weeks time we have we have dr ellen bialistock from york you know university in canada on and she is a distinguished research professor on the topic of bilingualism and its effects on on the cognitive and cognitive abilities across the life span you may have heard about maybe one of her most interesting researches we with regards to bilingualism and what effect it has on the symptoms of dement dementia later in in life we will however focus mainly on the benefits that bilingualism brings to children but i'm sure we will like with them as we will cover a lot of other topics as well so please make sure to mark your calendars and be there in two weeks time may i just add that i think very few i think probably no one has contributed to this field as much as ellen did so i think i would very much recommend this that is fantastic well thank you very much in two weeks september 1st same time uh 1 p.m new york 6 p.m london and 7 p.m paris thank you everybody we will see you in two weeks bye bye now thank you very much almost bye bye