Harvard University Press Blog

What bilingualism is not

François Grosjean is Professor Emeritus at Neuchâtel University (Switzerland). His new book, Bilingual: Life and Reality, which the Montreal Gazette calls“gentle, humorous, civilized”, explores the many aspects of bilingualism—from what it means to be bilingual, to the impact of having an accent in one language or the other, to the effects of bilingualism on children. Bilingualism is an important topic, and often a misunderstood one. Below, Grosjean deconstructs some common, internationally held misconceptions about bilingualism and the bilingual.

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I have had the chance to live and work for extended periods of time in at least three countries, the United States, Switzerland and France, and as a researcher on bilingualism, it has allowed me to learn a lot about my topic of interest. I have found that people in these countries share many misconceptions about bilingualism and bilinguals but that they also have very country-specific attitudes towards them.

Among shared misunderstandings, one is that bilingualism is a rare phenomenon. In fact, it has been estimated that more than half of the world's population is bilingual, that is uses two or more languages in everyday life. Bilingualism is found in all parts of the world, at all levels of society, in all age groups. Another common misconception is that bilinguals have equal knowledge of their languages. In fact, bilinguals know their languages to the level that they need them and many are dominant in one of them.

There are also the myths that real bilinguals do not have an accent in their different languages and that they are excellent all-around translators. This is far from being true. Having an accent or not does not make one more or less bilingual, and bilinguals often have difficulties translating specialized language. Then there is the misconception that all bilinguals are bicultural (they are not) and that they have double personalities (as a bilingual myself, and with a sigh of relief, I can tell you that this is not the case).

As concerns children, many worries and misconceptions are also widespread. The first is that bilingualism will delay language acquisition in young children. This was a popular myth in the first part of the last century, but there is no research evidence to that effect. Their rate of language acquisition is the same as that of their monolingual counterparts. There is also the fear that children raised bilingual will always mix their languages. In fact, they adapt to the situation they are in. When they interact in monolingual situations (e.g. with Grandma who doesn't speak their other language), they will respond monolingually; if they are with other bilinguals, then they may well code-switch. Finally, there is the worry that bilingualism will affect negatively the cognitive development of bilingual children. Recent research appears to show the contrary; bilingual children do better than monolingual children in certain cognitive tasks.

Aside from these common misunderstandings, certain attitudes are specific to countries and areas of the world. In Europe, for example, bilingualism is seen favorably but people have very high standards for who should be considered bilingual. The latter should have perfect knowledge of their languages, have no accent in them, and even, in some countries, have grown up with their two (or more) languages. At that rate, very few people consider themselves bilingual even though, in Switzerland for example, the majority of the inhabitants know and use two or more languages in their everyday life.

How about the United States? Einar Haugen, a pioneer of bilingualism studies, has stated that the US has probably been the home of more bilingual speakers than any other country in the world. Bilingualism here is very diverse, pairing English with Native American languages, older colonial languages, recent immigration languages, and so on. This said, it is not very extensive at any one time. Currently, only 17% of the population is bilingual as compared to much higher percentages in many other countries of the world. This is not due to the fact that new immigrants are not learning English. The reason, rather, is that bilingualism is basically short-lived and transitional in this country.

Rediscovering Symbiogenesis

Last month, we published Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution by Soviet-era Russian botanist Boris Kozo-Polyansky. Part scientific treatise, part historical detective work, the book resurrects a lost classic of evolutionary theory along with its fascinating backstory. The volume’s co-editors, Victor Fet and Lynn Margulis, argue that Kozo-Polyansky’s theories—now recognized as true by almost all biologists after decades of neglect—were far ahead of their time. Here, editor and translator Fet tells the story of Kozo-Polyansky’s discovery.

In the 1920s, a brilliant young Russian botanist synthesized the experimental work of evolutionary biologists across the world in order to theorize that symbiogenesis—the merging of separate organisms to form a single organism—played a leading role in evolution.  Working from this fundamental idea, the botanist, Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky, went on to broad-sweeping speculations, collecting examples of symbiogenetic systems from all groups of living organisms, and reconciling his new theory of symbiogenesis with the Darwinian evolutionary ideas of the early 1920s, well before the development of the neo-Darwinist New Synthesis theory that emerged in the 1930s and ’40s.

Below: Kozo-Polyansky as a young man

Many years before any evidence for horizontal transfer of genes and genomes entered the mainstream of biological thought, Kozo-Polyansky suggested that cells are in fact not just elementary units of life but cooperative systems (he in fact used the word “system”).The original Russian book was published in 1924, and its little-known author died in 1957. Kozo-Polyansky’s evolutionary ideas were ridiculed and forgotten. Only decades later, similar concepts proposed in 1970s-1980s de novo by Lynn Margulis, the co-editor of this edition, eventually found their way into scientific establishment, being spectacularly confirmed by the advances of cell and molecular biology in the 1980s-1990s.

Kozo-Polyansky's book is to some extent a “prescient” text, and many pages from it read as contemporary literature, for example (on the origin of cell’s organelles): “It was not the drive toward the division of labor that led to the formation of these organoids, but the fact that certain partners joined the system that made a specific scheme of labor division possible.” Kozo-Polyansky's stunning contribution, the one that distinguishes him from his great Russian predecessors at the "school of symbiogeneticists" such as K.S. Mereshkovsky, A.S. Famintzyn, et al. who wrote and/or were translated into other languages, was his Darwinist attitude. Kozo-Polyansky insisted that the Russians were correct: Symbiogenesis is the source of evolutionary (heritable) novelty—but, he posited, Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is responsible for the maintenance and perpetration of this heritable change.

A tale of two real tortoises and one plastic one

If you keep Cute Overload bookmarked, then have your “awwws” at hand before you read this article in The Guardian about Timmy, a Herrmann's tortoise.

Timmy, who makes his home at the Tortoise Garden sanctuary in Cornwall, had been bullied by other tortoises, and seemed morose until the sanctuary’s owner provided him with a plastic companion, Tanya.                                  Craig B. Stanford and friend

Now Timmy “fetches her food (and does not seem to mind that she does not eat it) and nuzzles his head against hers. He will not go to bed unless she is put into his hut before him…The lack of response does not seem to bother Timmy.”

Coincidentally (or perhaps because tortoise owners have always been suckers for alliteration), “Timothy” was also the name of the Testudo graeca brought to England by a sailor in 1740 and bought by Rebecca Snooke. When Snooke died in 1780, Timothy was inherited by her nephew, clergyman and renowned naturalist Gilbert White. Tortoise ownership had been in vogue in Britain since the 1600s, but Timothy became the first pet tortoise to have her life history recorded in detail; White, also the author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, carefully documented Timothy’s weight, swimming ability, hibernation patterns, hearing, and diet.

Timmy and Timothy were both lucky: according to Craig B. Stanford, “Of the tortoises that arrive in Europe healthy enough to be sold in a pet shop, 80 percent die within their first year in the hands of well-intentioned but incapable owners. By the third year out of the wild, an estimated 92 percent of all imported turtles and tortoises are dead.” These startling statistics, as well as Timothy’s story, appear in Stanford’s new book, The Last Tortoise: A Tale of Extinction in Our Lifetime.

Both a love letter to an animal that Stanford calls “the ultimate humble, unassuming creature, expecting nothing more than to be left alone deep inside that marvelous shell to live its long life peacefully,” and a fierce warning of the immediate dangers tortoises face from forces like smuggling, habitat loss, and human appetites, The Last Tortoise is an affecting, illuminating book that American Scientist says is “remarkably thorough, but tinged with anger and sadness at the senselessness of the crisis.”

In Memoriam: Mark Carroll, Former Director of HUP

Mark Carroll, director of Harvard University Press from 1967 until 1972, died July 1, The Washington Post reports. Carroll joined HUP in 1956.

“During Carroll’s four-year tenure,” the brief history of the Press on our website notes, “the Press published such seminal works as John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, E.O. Wilson’s The Insect Societies, and Notable American Women: 1607–1950, edited by Edward T. James and Janet W. James.”

“I think the attitude towards the bound book has changed. It's no longer the only storage device for thoughts”: An interview with artist Marianne Perlak

In 2006, Marianne Perlak left her post as HUP’s longtime art director to return to her first love, the fine arts. Now her folded books and wall constructions are represented at Chapter Two in Corea, Maine. Her altered books were the subject of a show last spring at the Wellesley Free Library. Most recently, her transfigured Dartmouth Bible won the Book Arts Category at the New England Book Show.                                    Above: The Calligrapher, by Edward Docx

Perlak became a book designer by way of Pratt Institute and an MFA from the Boston Museum School/Tufts University. Initially attracted by a deliberate, stage-by-stage process that recalled the printmaking that had been her academic focus, she practiced book design at Ginn and Company, a children’s textbook publisher, and at Xerox College Publishing before joining Harvard University Press as a designer in 1975. Perlak became HUP’s first art director in 1986, and remained with us for twenty years. She and her husband, HUP author Rob Paarlberg, now live part-time on the Schoodic Peninsula in Maine.

Recently, Perlak agreed to talk with us about the inspiration for her art, the connection between book design and her current work, and about what kind of book begs to be transformed.

Q. Which came first for you—designing books, or making book art? How does the content of a book inform the way you fold it?

I'm not at all sure I would have explored book as art object if I had not first spent years designing books to be read. My first foray into a new expression involved a bucket of white acrylic paint and a mission to mask subject matter and readability (image left). With no disrespect intended, it provided a balance to the kind of nuance and attention to detail that is the designer's professional world. Later, when I stopped designing books and focused my attention on art, I found myself once again enticed by the notion of planning and measuring, this time to create sculptural forms from the books themselves. Concerning content, a non-linear novelist will probably end up with an asymmetrical design, but in general, content gives way to pure form.

Q. For you, how does the relationship between the content of a book and its transfigured version differ from the relationship between a book and a cover image you have designed?

There is a huge difference. A book jacket is all about being true to content whereas the folded book has become something else entirely. I go back and forth in allowing the title and author to be revealed on the binding.

Occasionally, I rebind a book and cover the title to focus only on the shape and texture.

Heirs apparent, then and now

It’s a terrible story: a middle-aged American man was attacked at his home in France by thieves who beat him with a baseball bat before making off with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and jewelry. The man’s last name, McDonald, and his ostensible ties to the McDonald’s fast food fortune rocketed the incident to international attention (in the form of ledes like, “These robbers were no Hamburglars”—keep it classy, New York Daily News). 

In the days after the news broke, enterprising reporters discovered that there seemed to be no connection between Geoffrey McDonald, the victim of the home invasion, and McDonald’s, the home of the McRib.

In the age of the telephone and internet, such a case of assumed or alleged heirdom is quickly unraveled. But the Australia of the early 19th century was a different story. And that’s where Kirsten McKenzie’s new book, A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty, takes place.

Accused of forgery in 1835, a slight, balding man named John Dow shocked a Sydney courtroom by claiming he was Edward, Viscount Lascelles, eldest son of the powerful Earl of Harewood, and heir to one of Britain’s most spectacular fortunes. The Crown alleged he was a confidence trickster and serial impostor.

In what the Times Higher Education Supplement calls “a highly gripping narrative, its sociological insights conveyed largely through a series of striking human dramas,” McKenzie follows a fascinating tale of adventure and deceit across two worlds—those of British aristocrats and Australian felons—connected in an emerging age of opportunity and individualism, where personal worth (and wealth) battled power based on birth alone.

In this age of liberty, could one be anyone one wanted? How does one invent oneself in society? These are the questions that McKenzie takes up in her book. And as the McDonald’s incident illustrates, they are questions that retain their relevance even today.