You're confusing him!

To show why mother languages matter, here's my story how educators in Australia tried stopping my parents speaking to me in my mother language.

Do you know that as a child I was told I’d only ever speak basic English… and nothing more?!

Here’s my story for International Mother Language Day, commemorated every year on 21 February.

Strictly speaking, my mother language is Macedonian. It was the first language I spoke – even though I was born and (mainly) raised in Australia where the predominant language is English. But when almost all of the adults around me spoke little (if any) English, plus having spent a part of my early childhood in Yugoslavia, I didn’t really have much choice in the matter. And that’s where my need to speak in multiple languages came from – if you’re a child and you want to eat something, then you’ll have to say “I want to eat something” in the language that the adults speak.

All was fine, it seemed, but even at kindergarten in Australia, I hardly spoke English. I still managed to communicate with the other children, but when you spend most of the time playing and you’re 4 or 5 years old, what substantial interaction do you really have that warrants deep verbal communication. So when it was time for me to start primary school, not speaking English was deemed a major problem.

To put some context here, it’s Australia around 1980. At the time, the country had only started to experience an influx of non-European immigrants, which was quite a shock for a country that had a policy of maintaining a white racial majority (the “White Australia Policy”) until 1972. Apart from the small number of indigenous Australians (who were rarely seen in the major cities where most Aussies live), plus the very random exceptions (such as multi-generation Chinese-Australians), the most visible minority group in Australia at the time were the “New Australians”… or more commonly and totally pejoratively referred to – “wogs”. They were migrants from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and other Mediterranean countries that had arrived in huge numbers since the 1950s. My parents as “wogs” from communist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, with strange Slavic (so in the eyes of most Aussies – Russian, i.e. Soviet, i.e. enemy) names, and swarthy features, meant they were treated with great suspicion.

As a child I had blond hair. My sister had snow-white hair. My parents had jet-black hair, so that raised some eyebrows. A neighbour let my mother know that the word on our street was that my sister and I must have been adopted. We also did things based on our Macedonian culture, which often ran counter to what was expected in mainstream Anglo-Australian society. One was Christmas, which for Macedonians is not on 25 December but is a rather low-key celebration held two weeks later on 7 January. No, that was not good enough for Australia. After having casually mentioned at school that my mother “doesn’t like Christmas”, she was called into the teacher’s office and told to explain herself!

And to top things off, my parents were not speaking to me in English, which in the Anglo monoculture of the time in Australia, raised major hackles.

Seeing that I wasn’t speaking English to a level expected for a child my age in Australia, I obviously had a speech impediment, and so my mother was ordered to take me to see a speech therapist.

I still remember the session clearly. It was in a small but brightly decorated room. The the speech therapist was sternly spoken women, who I recall showed a disdain for me. I was asked to complete some cognitive exercises. I honestly thought these were stupid. So when I was told to pick up a pencil and place it at the end of the table, I reacted in the most natural way possible in protest – I chucked the pencil away.

The speech therapist was not happy. She called in my waiting mother and gave her conclusions. Apparently my parents were “confusing” me by speaking in “their language” in front of me. Doing so was making me “intellectually behind”. To “reverse the damage”, my parents were instructed to switch to speaking in English only.

That was something my Australian-born mother could manage, but getting my Macedonian-born father to speak in English to me, a language he barely knew, was completely impractical.

They were made to feel ashamed of their mother language.

But it gets crazier:
The therapist told my mother that I needed to forget my mother language as it was “not necessary”. Academically, I was a lost cause. As I was supposedly already very late in my linguistic development, the speech therapist rather confidently stated I would only ever gain a basic level of English. As for learning a language later on in life – no chance whatsoever!

Needless to say, my parents were devastated.

But not to worry... it didn’t take this plucky five-year-old long to prove them all wrong.

Starting school is always intimidating. My only memory of the start of school was that my school bag was very uncomfortable to carry, and that the first day of school was unseasonably cold and overcast for February in Australia. I was completely unaware that my mother was scared of what awaited me with my basket-case lack of English. But by going to school I was changing my daytime linguistic environment from one dominated by Macedonian to English. So within the first week of school, the “burst” occurred – out of nowhere I began speaking fluent Australian English just like my classmates.

And as for learning other languages, well, not only was I able to maintain my Macedonian, but I also picked up Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian from communicating with relatives and friends, and then by age 12, I was one of the small number of students selected to go to a specialist language high school where students had the opportunity to learn two languages – a rare luxury at the time (I opted for German and Spanish).

I’ve always dreamed of seeing that speech therapist again to give her a piece of my mind!

However, more than four decades later, families around the world are still being told not to speak their mother language at home – because of myths about “confusion” or pressure to prioritise prestige languages.

Yet research consistently shows that strong foundations in a first language support cognitive development, identity and even additional language acquisition.

That’s why International Mother Language Day matters.