Multilingualism and Children's Literature

Abstract

Multilingualism and Children's Literature Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (bio) Many Marias, a Jorge, a Ramon, an Eduardo, Jesus (two of them), Cammillo and his sister Consuelo, Diego, Pedro, Luisa... What can I, Nancy Smith from Maple Road, teach them? What can they learn from me? (30) This quotation from the picturebook Blackboard, Blackboard on the Wall, Who Is the Fairest One of All? (1978), written by teacher Albert Cullum and illustrated by more than 15 artists, perfectly matches the scope of this special issue: the awareness that our global societies are more and more determined by heterogeneity, multilingualism, and multiculturalism. As a consequence, an increasing number of students speak different languages and are affected by diverse cultural traditions. "Melting pot" or "mosaic" countries, such as Canada, the USA, and the UK, have been exposed to this situation for many decades. Their populations consist of immigrants from all over the world, whose native languages and cultures contribute to an elusively multicultural and multilingual mixture. However, most of the immigrants and their children do not speak the official language of their new home country. They necessarily learn English as second or even third language, a fact that has a verifiable impact on institutions of learning, such as kindergartens, primary schools, and secondary schools. Stimulated by educational and cultural studies, which investigate the linguistic and cultural foreknowledge of immigrant students and consider the resulting influence on school curricula, publishers in the United States started to release bilingual and multilingual children's books in the 1960s. Since then, the number of multilingual picturebooks targeted at pre-school and primary school children has increased, with a huge percentage of Spanish-American books (Chapell & Faltis 2007). Even [End Page iv] if multilingual children's books present just a small part of the entire children's book section in the USA and other countries, they constitute a seminal part of the modern book and media world. These books served and still serve different purposes: they foster children's second language acquisition and they contribute to the estimation of the immigrants' languages and cultures, thus supporting intercultural understanding (Baker 2006; Diamond & Moore 1985). Usually, these picturebooks are translations with two or up to four languages printed on the same or alternate pages. But there are also inter-lingual picturebooks that combine different languages, thus inviting readers to switch between two to four languages under the condition that they have at least a basic knowledge of these languages (Eder 2009). Generally, the major part of these texts is written in one language—often the native language¾while the remaining text is written in another language, sometimes even in different languages. In order to assist the reader during the reading process, notions and phrases in the non-native languages are translated. The translation is put into brackets and printed directly after the non-native expression, or the translations are given in a glossary attached to the main text. Other multilingual picturebooks, however, do not render translations of the nonnative languages, thus challenging the reader to grasp the meaning of the unknown notions and phrases by attentively considering the text and the accompanying pictures for necessary clues. Inter-lingual picturebooks demand a specific capacity, namely the ability to switch between different languages, on the one hand, and to acknowledge the visual codes presented in the pictures, on the other. This multiple code-switching, a term introduced by scholars working in the realm of multilingual research, is a major distinction of multilingual picturebooks and children's books. However, how this code-switching exactly functions and what abilities are required in order to apprehend such picturebooks is not well understood and has not been thoroughly investigated as yet. Multilingualism is a phenomenon that is prevalent in many European and non-European countries, especially in such countries and regions that have more than one official language, such as Belgium, India, Kenya, Spain, South Africa, and Switzerland. Despite this language policy, multilingual children's books hardly exist in these countries. The standard consists of publishing children's books in different linguistic editions, whereas bilingual and multilingual editions are usually not provided. Nevertheless, attentive readers can observe that multilingual books for children matter to the...