Bilingual: Growing Up With More Than One Language

Growing up with more than one language strongly impacts how a child may grow up and function. A child typically has more grasp on their language development causing them to potentially start speaking earlier than most children their age without another language. For example, six-year-old Natan Machado Palombini, in which the documentary Alamar captures his summer vacation with his father in the Banco Chinchorro Reef located in Quintana Roo, Mexico. We can assume that Natan has grown up speaking Italian with his mother, and Spanish with his father. Most children who are bilingual or multilingual have much more advantages compared to their peers who are monolingual. To begin with, Natan seemed to become very accustomed to his new surroundings,

The realization that because Natan is bilingual could be the reason he didn’t have any issues getting used to where he was now staying. If Natan had a friend back home in Italy, who only spoke Italian, the question is, could they survive in this environment? The answer might probably be no. For many bilingual individuals, they are able to acquaint themselves in different surroundings because of the ability of speaking more than one language. There are many other advantages that bilingual or multilingual people have over monolingual people. It creates a sense of understanding and appreciation for cultures and languages beyond their own, more success in schooling including the workforce, and possible delays in cognitive problems later in life. Other times, someone who travels frequently might have a better sense of why others dress, act or talk a certain way, and detect a language being spoken around them. Another instance can be when a bilingual child is in class working on a project at school with a monolingual student as their partner; the bilingual child

From personal experience, there are always many people that think foreigners might do “weird” things, but to the frequent travelers, it isn’t weird at all. Why? Because these are the people have seen it all while traveling. Why does this seem to stick out? The frequent travelers have seen thousands of different people from other places in the world. Often times, the closed-minded people are the ones who judge, however, let’s stop to think what Americans might look like to the foreigners as well: arrogant and rude. The monolingual children are also subject to lack of concentration in school. They also might have risks of developing cognitive problems in the future or not getting the job they want because they only speak one language. Although, an advantage that the monolingual children have is that they have more vocabulary and faster retrieval which helps in a short amount of