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Bilingualism should not be a flaw in a globalized world. However, those who grow up within migrant families usually speak different languages at home than at school.In Germany people who speak Turkish or Polish in addition to German, must face discrimination. Margarete Stokowski, who grew up in Berlin, born in Poland, shares her experience.

The newspaper Bild has recently sounded the alarm again. “Only one out of every 103 children speaks German at home” was the title on the front page. A Neukölln school principal complained: “We are Arabized!” and: “We are here at the front.” Directly calleded it a war, why not. The principal noted there are horrific reasons why many of the children were not educated at all. First you have to learn basic things, writes Bild, for example: “When you meet someone, you greet them.” As if it would be surprising that children would not want to say hello to their principal.

Like musky clothes from the flea market

Princess Charlotte, the child of Kate and William, was recently adored by the British media because, as a two-year-old, she was reportedly able to speak two languages. It’s a good thing the nanny speaks Spanish and not Arabic. But then god would have to really save the Queen.

As a child I thought for a long time that growing up bilingually means that besides German you also speak French or English at home and not what the “Polacks” and “Kanaken” do. “Bilingual” sounded like something valuable, while as a child I felt that my mother tongue was something I should get rid of. Like the old clothes from the flea market, which could eventually be replaced by fancy adidas stuff, if you saved long enough. Polish was synonymous with poor, synonymous with: better not there.

“You do not learn Turkish, you forget Turkish,” wrote Kübra Gümüsay in a “taz” column. “What would have happened if you had not seen problems in the migrant children, but potential and future?” She asks. “Could one stop reducing failures, that they could neither choose nor discard, to their ethnic origins?”

The author Emilia Smechowski, in her book “Wir Strebermigranten” (Us nerd migrants), tells how her family came to Germany in 1988, the same year as mine. Their parents tried to become German as soon as possible, which also meant that they were uncomfortable when their daughters spoke Polish in the subway: “My dad’s face got long, I did not know what I had done wrong Mother looked around in panic. (…) “Psst!”, she said, and when we got off the subway, she squatted in front of us and said, ‘Girl, from now on, one rule applies: In Germany we speak German.’ This ‘Psst!’ should become a background noise of our first months in Germany (…) From the serious Polish child was within a short time a dumb German.”

Second language, an actual skill?

I know this educational idea of my grandparents, who came to Germany a little earlier than we did, and wanted my siblings and me to speak only German in public. But as a toddler you have to understand the difference between the languages. In my family it is a popular anecdote, as we were children in front of the TV learning german with “Sesame Street” and as a two-year old, I would yell “glosniej!” (“louder!”) because I did not understand that Samson and Tiffy were speaking in a foreign language.

At any rate, attempting to prevent Polish in public eventually led to children developing the strange habit, even though Polish was spoken to us at home, to answer in German as perfect as (sweet) potatoes. It was not until 20 years later, during my studies, that I spent a summer in Poland working in a cemetery and it struck me that being able to speak Polish was not a flaw, but an extra skill. It was, to put it briefly, a stark realization. I had a complete land open to me, I could talk, sing, work, everything (the only thing I did not know was the words “fuck” and “smoke pot”, but that came quick).

It is not a problem at all if children in German schools do not speak German at home. It is only a problem if the educational institutions they are going into can not expect that people of different backgrounds live in Germany. I interviewed Beate Lütke, a professor of didactics of German as a Second Language. “The languages a child grows with are key to his or her family, social, cultural and social identity, which is why it matters that these languages are valued not only in private, but also in public space – especially in kindergarten and at school – and used for all-linguistic learning,” she said.

It is of course no coincidence that Bild is looking for a horror example of a school in Neukölln, a district that is still largely characterized by poverty, and to a large extent by the poverty of migrant people who do not always can choose where they live. I know Germans who have been fake-reassigned to continue to live in cool neighborhoods, but to be able to send their children to better schools, where “better” means fewer poor people, fewer foreigners.

The less linguistic a country is, the less respect it has for minorities

However, multilingualism, not only in Berlin, is for many people a reality that could be promoted in the education system instead of dividing it into good and bad according to racist criteria. The didactic professor Lütke criticizes that in schools the “multilingual resources are practically hardly used.”

On the contrary: “Children at school even hide their native languages for fear of discrimination, even though we know that learners would benefit from appreciating and taking into account all their languages brought in overall language learning and, in particular, in their personal development.” And not only the learning children would benefit.

No one knows me in such a way that I often let men have the last word, but in this case another expert should have it, Hans-Jürgen Krumm, emeritus professor for German as foreign and second language, who reports from the research: The less linguistic a country is, the less respect it has for minorities.”

Spiegel.de