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Chapter 1. Community Languages: an asset for Scotland
1.1 What are community languages?
This report describes provision for community language learning in Scotland. Community languages are defined as all languages in use in a society, other than the dominant or national language(s). In Scotland, where the dominant language is English, community languages include Gaelic, Scots, Urdu, Punjabi, Chinese, Polish, Italian and British Sign Language ( BSL), among many others. Languages which have traditionally been taught as modern (foreign) languages in Scottish schools (e.g. French, German, Spanish) are also community languages for those who use these languages at home or in the community.
The terms 'community languages' and 'modern languages' are not mutually exclusive. Rather, the choice of term implies differences in the students' linguistic backgrounds and therefore their relationship to the language they are learning. These differences may result in different teaching and learning approaches. While students of modern languages are assumed to have no previous experience of the language before they begin to study it, and to have limited opportunities for contact with speakers of the language, students of community languages usually have family, cultural or other personal experiences of the language which predate formal study of the language. In some cases they may already be fluent speakers of the language, because they have grown up speaking the language at home, and/or because they have lived in a country where the language is widely spoken, and perhaps attended school there, with opportunities to become literate in the language. In other cases, the language may be one of several in use in a multilingual household or community, and use may be reserved for particular contexts, such as certain cultural activities, phone conversations with relatives in another country, or religious worship. For these reasons, it is inaccurate to regard provision for community languages necessarily as provision which supports students' 'first language' or 'mother tongue', nor should it be assumed that community language learners are already highly fluent in the language in question.
1.2 The languages of Scotland
Scotland has always been a multilingual country. In addition to the languages with a long-established presence - Gaelic, Scots and English - Scotland has a long history of immigration and of receiving refugees from around the world. Linguistic histories of Scotland recognise the influence of Scandinavian settlers, Flemish merchants and the Auld Alliance with France. The presence of Gypsies in Scotland is recorded from the 16 th century onwards (Fraser, 1992), while other Traveller groups may date back long before this time. Some of the distinctive communities currently living in Scotland can trace their origins at least as far back as the 19 th and early 20 th centuries: e.g. Irish, Italians, Jews, Lithuanians, Indians and Pakistanis (Devine, 1999; Maan, 1992; Pugh, 2000). Others, such as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Iranians, the Poles and speakers of many different African languages, have arrived in Scotland more recently. Sign languages have a long history wherever communities of Deaf people are to be found (Smith, 1996), and the origins of British Sign Language are believed to date back to the 19 th century, when organisations to support Deaf people were first established (Montgomery, 1997; Smith, 2001), Makaton, another sign language, was developed in the 1970s to support the communication needs of people with a range of communication difficulties. As it is closely tied to spoken English, it is not regarded as an independent language in the same way as British Sign Language, but is nevertheless growing in importance as a communicative medium.
Although a variety of bodies collect information about languages in use in different parts of Scotland, there has never been a national language survey. There are currently consultations across the UK concerning the possible inclusion of a question in the 2011 Census on languages in use. If this option is included a far more detailed picture of the range of languages spoken by people living in the UK will become available than has been possible with previous Census data, which collected data only on ethnicity, and, in Scotland, on Gaelic. In the absence of these data, the research conducted for this study offers the most comprehensive account currently available of languages in use among Scottish schoolchildren.
1.3 The case for a comprehensive approach
Traditionally, issues relating to provision for learning 'indigenous' languages such as Gaelic, Scots, sign languages and the languages of Gypsies/ Travellers have rarely been considered in the same context as languages such as Urdu, Arabic or Chinese, While recognising that some languages constitute 'special cases' in Scotland, there are compelling reasons for addressing provision for all community languages in the same context. They are all regarded as 'minority' languages in relation to English, and speakers of these languages therefore share many common experiences and concerns. For example, all families or communities where a language other than English is in use have to develop their own models of plurilingualism which both maintain the community language(s) and also enable community members to communicate more widely with English speakers. Parents have to make complex decisions about education, particularly where education through the medium of the community language is not available. The history of separate consideration for Gaelic, Scots and British Sign Language, compared both with each other and with the other community languages has given rise to different forms of provision for each group. Although it is not necessarily the case that provision for all groups should be the same, there could be benefits in developing an integrated approach, based on the recognition that plurilingualism is an asset for individuals and for society and that an integrated policy could avoid inconsistencies and omissions.
1.4 Community Languages as a resource for the individual, for communities and for Scotland
Helping children to maintain and develop their community languages is important for individuals, for their communities, and for wider Scottish society, for many different reasons:
- families have the right to pass on their cultural and linguistic heritage to their children;
- children who have the opportunity to grow up plurilingual have the obvious linguistic advantage of being able to speak more than one language;
- research has shown that plurilingual children have cognitive advantages deriving from the more sophisticated brain development which learning two or more languages from an early age promotes;
- having access to a range of languages is an important economic, cultural, social and intellectual resource for any society.
There is now a substantial body of research testifying to the benefits plurilingualism brings to the individual. It has positive effects on both linguistic and educational development. (See Baker, 2000; Cummins, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000 for overviews of this work.) Research has found that the level of development of children's first language is a strong predictor of their second language development, and that promoting languages other than the majority language at school helps develop not only these languages, but also children's abilities in the majority language (Dutcher, 1994). Studies of intelligence have shown that plurilingual children perform better than their monolingual peers in a range of areas, such as classification skills, concept formation, analogical reasoning, visual-spatial skills, creativity, and other cognitive gains. (Bialystok, 1991; Baker 1993), while comparisons of plurilingual and monolingual students' performance in school subjects such as literacy, numeracy and science, show that plurilingual students who have had the opportunity to develop both languages in an academic context (such as children who speak both Gaelic and English and attend Gaelic medium schools) perform at least as well, and sometimes better than their monolingual counterparts (Johnstone et al., 1999; Johnstone, 2001).
Many of the benefits which modern languages specialists identify for students who gain competence in languages they have studied at school, such as French, German or Spanish, apply equally to those who have acquired community languages such as Urdu, Chinese or Greek. These include increased awareness of and interest in the wider world, greater confidence in communicating in a range of different contexts, enhanced understanding of cultural differences and a willingness to engage with people and ideas from elsewhere in the world (Gallagher-Brett, 2004). These are personal qualities of value in themselves, but also are clearly of considerable worth in a business context. A key issue for the UK in the age of globalisation is which languages are likely to be of most benefit for the economy, for trade, and for international relations in the 21 st century (Hagen, 2005). Some of the most widely spoken and studied community languages - Urdu, Turkish, Chinese, Bengali and Arabic - are likely to be on that list.
Many recent reports have pointed to the increasing importance of multilingualism in a world in which international communications, labour force mobility and the impact of globalisation on business and on culture are key factors in economic and political change (e.g. Beacco and Byram, 2003; Commission of the European Communities, 2003; Lo Bianco, 2001). Investing in community languages, in addition to modern languages in schools, will ensure greater diversity in the range of languages for Scotland to draw on in business, cultural, political and social contexts. It will also capitalise on existing language skills and expertise. Such investment could constitute a valuable counter-balance to the current decline in uptake of provision for modern languages post-Standard Grade (McPake et al., 1999).
Support for community language learning and use also has an important role to play in terms of valuing diversity in Scottish society. Since the establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1998 there have been a number of policy initiatives to promote cultural and linguistic diversity, including the National Cultural Strategy (Scottish Executive, 2000) and the One Scotland1 campaign to tackle racism. A commitment to diversity entails recognition of the wide range of languages in use in Scotland and support so that these languages and the cultural activities associated with them can flourish.
There is an unmet need for people who can speak community languages in the Scottish public sector and in businesses serving multilingual communities (McPake and Johnstone, 2002). There are currently insufficient numbers of interpreters and translators to meet the needs of those who cannot (yet) communicate in English, or who would prefer to discuss matters which may be sensitive or complex in the language in which they feel best able to deal with their legal or medical problems, housing needs, or their children's education. Services which habitually work with people from particular linguistic communities would benefit from employing bilingual staff, but often find this difficult or impossible to do. Businesses which serve multilingual communities have, in some cases, recognised the advantages of employing people fluent in the relevant community languages: for example, in some parts of the UK, B&Q employs plurilingual staff who can discuss DIY matters with customers in a variety of languages.
1.5 Investing in Scotland's linguistic resources
If Scotland is to capitalise on these linguistic resources, we need first to invest in them. This entails educational provision at every level, to enable children to maintain and develop their competence in their community languages and to become literate. Just as children who speak only English need many years of English teaching at school to become skilled, articulate users of the language in both spoken and written forms, plurilingual children need support for both or all their languages to acquire similar levels of oral and written competence.
Gaelic-medium provision in a number of Scottish primary schools is an example of such investment. Research has shown that children who have attended such schools typically achieve high levels of competence in both languages by the time they move on to secondary education, at age 11 (Johnstone et al., 1999). Those who are able to maintain and develop their skills in both Gaelic and English will, as adults, be in a position to support the various initiatives under way to preserve and promote this endangered language: they will be able to work in a range of jobs in the cultural, educational and tourism sectors and, by using Gaelic in their daily lives, particularly with their own children, contribute to its revival.
The introduction of Standard Grade Urdu in 1998 is another example of investment. Urdu is probably the most widely used community language in Scotland, after Scots and Gaelic and is of particular significance to communities of Pakistani origin in Scotland as the national language of Pakistan, spoken by 104 million people around the world, and the language of education and literacy. Ensuring that children can speak and read Urdu is seen as an important contribution to their education and understanding of their cultural heritage and identity. Urdu is very closely related to Hindi (they are mutually intelligible, although written with entirely different scripts) and fluency in Urdu opens up opportunities to understand and communicate with people throughout the Indian subcontinent. Enabling children to formalise their knowledge of Urdu and gain recognition for their existing skills, through gaining Standard Grade passes in the language, is important both in recognising the significance of this language in Scotland and in encouraging students to think of the language as relevant to their educational and career aspirations. Examination results 2 make clear that children who sit this examination perform well, compared with students sitting examinations in other modern languages, although students sitting Standard Grade examinations in Gàidhlig gain the highest grades:
Chart 1a: Percentage of students gaining Grades 1 and 2 at Standard Grade
For some of the other community languages in use in Scotland, there is complementary provision, organised principally by linguistic communities for their own children. Typically, children attend language classes after school hours or at weekends, with the intention of developing their language skills, becoming literate, and acquiring cultural understandings relevant to the language and their community. In some cases, children who have attended such classes may be able to sit GCSE or A-Level examinations in their community languages: English examination boards cater for approximately 20 community languages. As with Standard Grade Urdu, this option allows students to gain recognition for their language skills and link these to their future education and career plans. However, for many of the languages in use in Scotland today there is neither complementary provision nor the opportunity to sit examinations in the language. Children who speak languages for which there is no provision may therefore be unable to become literate, may fail to see their languages are relevant to their education or careers, and thus, in adult life, their language skills may be lost both to their own communities and to wider Scottish society. 3
The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which current provision - whether in mainstream schools or complementary classes, schools or centres - enables plurilingual children to maintain and develop their languages, particularly in terms of acquiring literacy skills and other formal aspects, to enable them to make use of these languages in a range of contexts in adult life.
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