Ms. Grjasnowa, you speak Russian with your children and your husband speaks Arabic.

You speak English together.

So they don't have a common family language.

Do you feel that this is a loss or an enrichment?

Leonie Feuerbach

Editor in Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin.

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    Neither nor.

    We have adjusted well to this, but it was not a conscious decision, it resulted from our résumés: I came to Germany from Azerbaijan in 1996, my husband from Syria in 2013.

    And it was important to us that our children speak both languages.

    The more complicated it gets, the more likely the children are to answer us in German.

    It is not unusual for family languages ​​to change, in my family, for example, from Yiddish to Russian to German.

    This is not as rare as we might think.

    In the past, researchers spoke of “dual semilingualism” when they were talking about children growing up multilingual.

    These children would not really speak any language, so the concern.

    Yes, but that is an outdated concept.

    There are now numerous studies that refute this.

    Of course, children who grow up with two languages ​​in Germany, for example, cannot always use the other language of origin, which is not spoken in the respective country, as perfectly as children who grow up monolingually.

    But there is no need to worry about being bilingual.

    It is a benefit to speak another language, even if you do not have a perfect command of it, and you do not have to worry that learning other languages ​​will come at the expense of your German.

    Is it really completely unjustified to worry that several languages ​​are overwhelming for children?

    Multilingualism is not harmful, it is good for the brain and may even prevent Alzheimer's.

    Certainly the Russian of a child growing up in Russia is better than that of my children.

    But her German is just as good as that of the others.

    In addition, double standards are used here.

    Because bilingual children still speak both languages ​​much better than, for example, the foreign language they learn in school.

    And that is not called “half-lingualism”.

    Yes exactly.

    And even among children who grow up monolingually speaking German, there are insane differences in their respective language skills, and not just in childhood.

    Multilingualism is not a problem, it is a great asset.

    In your book you write that multilingualism is also the norm for most people.

    Yes, after all, there aren't 200 countries in the world, but there are 7000 languages.

    That said, most of the world is multilingual, and most people live with multiple languages.

    Historically, monolingualism developed relatively late, it facilitates state formation, but today it is at the expense of diversity.

    Now the world is becoming more global and diverse again.

    Many children in Germany grow up bilingually, some even speak three or four languages.

    For this new reality the terms seem to be missing in part.

    As a child, her daughter was labeled as a "non-German language of origin".

    Did that surprise you?

    Yes.

    After all, most of their everyday life takes place in German.

    Her language of origin is neither Russian nor Arabic, but clearly German.

    Even so, when the language proficiency of all four-year-olds was recorded, it was placed in this category.

    From this point of view, I am also considered a Russian native speaker.

    I am a German-speaking writer, teach literary writing at the university - in German - and have missed the last 20 years of language development in Russia.

    My Russian is no longer that of a native speaker.

    The concept of the mother tongue is too static for me anyway.

    Is there a better one?

    In interpreting studies, there is a distinction between A, B and C languages.

    The A language is the language that someone knows best and into which one can interpret.

    There can be several A languages ​​or just one.

    Interpreters speak the B language almost as well, but this is the language used for interpreting.

    The C language is then again one that is even worse mastered.

    I think that's a good concept.

    German is my A language, Russian and English are B, if not C languages.

    On Twitter the other day someone listed things that are considered cool by the rich and "assi" by the poor.

    In addition to “having a lot of children” and “drinking alcohol”, it was also said: “speak more than one language”.

    Multilingualism has a lot to do with social factors.

    Some languages ​​have a high social prestige, others a low one.

    There are schools in Berlin that promote multilingualism in English, Spanish or French.

    These are often private schools that cost a lot of money: multilingualism as a distinguishing feature.

    However, public schools with multilingualism in Arabic or Turkish are branded as focus schools - also because of the low income of the parents.

    A few years ago, the CSU demanded in a lead motion: "Anyone who wants to live here permanently should be encouraged to speak German in public spaces and in the family." Did that annoy you?

    Yes, because this debate is only aimed at certain groups. If you speak English or French at home, this is not against you. A certain resentment is reflected there that some do not want to integrate, assimilate. Apart from that: which German do you mean? That of Goethe or that of Dieter Bohlen? Which dialect? This should suggest the idea of ​​a national community that does not exist. But this is not an exclusively German problem: In the Soviet Union, for example, Azerbaijani had a very bad standing, in Great Britain Welsh for a long time.