Many Voices

Attitudes to bilingualism have always been contradictory. The possession of more than one language has been thought to be an advantage, even a necessity, while simultaneously being regarded as an inconvenience, sometimes a disastrous one. Yet more than half the world’s population is bilingual. Britain is also now a multilingual society. It is therefore important to understand the phenomenon of bilingualism and to unravel the contradictions in attitudes towards it. In her book Many Voices (originally published in 1983 and now with a new foreword by John Yandell), Jane Miller has set out to listen to children and to adults—some of whom are well-known writers—for whom bilingualism is undeniably an asset.

If there are advantages to being bilingual, there are also problems: personal, social, and inevitably, political ones. Jane miller moves from individual testimonies to their cultural and educational implications. It may be, she suggests, that we can gain from the strengths of bilingual speakers’ knowledge which could enrich schooling and the curriculum for all children. By attending to the experiences of people who have had to make their way within a new society, we learn something about how all individuals construct their identities out of cultural difference. Language, languages are central to this. Jane Miller argues that bilingualism allows for a special focus on developments in culture generally which is useful to teachers, linguists, readers of literature, and makers of educational policy.