Whether Arabic, Polish or Albanian – in addition to cultural diversity, the German migration society also brings with it linguistic diversity. That in one Family Speaking two or more languages is part of everyday life for many people in Germany. Around one in five children in this country grows up multilingual.
Multilingualism, no matter what language, has many advantages. The latest scientific findings even show a health benefit: Those who speak several languages and use them regularly age more slowly. It has long been known that multilingualism trains the brain and can protect against dementia.
Apart from that, languages are seen as a gateway to the world, as a means of expressing one’s own perspectives and of establishing connections: be it with other cultural areas and societies, with one’s own family or one’s own identity.
But while knowledge of school languages such as English, French or Spanish tend to elicit admiration and be seen as desirable by society, others are assessed more negatively and sometimes even underestimated. People whose mother tongue is not English or one of the Romance languages are often confronted with negative statements: Turkish sounds “ugly”, Hindi is “foreign” or Kurdish is “backward”. Many people experience linguistics, the devaluation and discrimination of language skills – in public spaces, during job interviews or in school lessons. Their performance is wrongly assessed as being worse or their non-German language skills are ignored instead of being seen as a resource.
We are looking for people who grew up speaking a language other than German at home: by learning and using this other language themselves or by having parents who speak another language.
Tell us about your experiences: What languages do you or your parents speak? Did your parents teach you the language? Were you even able to attend a language class to learn your native language? What experiences have you had with multilingualism in your family? What experiences have you had in public spaces, at school or at work when you or your parents spoke your first language? And how do you view your cultural identity? If you have children of your own, to what extent are you concerned with multilingual upbringing?
Write to us using the form or by email community-redaktion@zeit.de. We want to publish selected articles on zeit.de, anonymously if requested.
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