should immigrant children be allowed to use their mother tongue in class?

There has been quite a debate in Germany - with this story from two years ago: Immigrant children must only speak German at schools, conservative lawmaker says

Mario Czaja, secretary general of the Christian Democratic Union, claimed that many immigrants are poorly integrated into society due to insufficient German language skills, and called for new measures at schools. “Care should be taken to ensure that German is the main language spoken in schools. It is not acceptable for languages other than German to be spoken in the schoolyard,” Czaja told the Die Welt newspaper. The senior politician of the Germany’s main opposition party argued that more language experts, social workers and pedagogues should be hired for schools in places where many migrants live.

And indeed at the same time, there was a general push for better language skills: German chancellor calls for regular German language tests in schools

Others would disagree:

Immigrant organizations criticized Czaja’s controversial remarks, which echoed previous suggestions by right-wing politicians, who called for banning speaking of foreign languages in the schoolyard. Berin Arukaslan, co-chair of Turkish parents association in Berlin-Brandenburg, has underlined that speaking mother tongue is a fundamental human right, guaranteed by the constitution.

To what extent should we go the other way and allow immigrants and their children learn their own mother tongue? 'I can't say my own name': The pain of language loss in families - BBC Future

"I discovered how often it happens that bilingually raised children don't speak two languages," explains De Houwer, who is also the president of the International Association of the Study of Child Language. The survey and later studies by De Houwer and others across different countries and languages found that between 12% and 44% of children who grow up hearing two or more languages, actually end up speaking only one language. "Most babies start by learning words in both languages. But when they go to preschool they only continue with one. And why is that? Because suddenly there is only a focus on this one part of them and children soon sense that their other language is worthless. Worthless!"

In my case, there were actually two losses. I didn't learn my mother's native language, Polish, either. When I was growing up, my parents were warned against teaching me Bengali or Polish. They were told that if children learn more than one language simultaneously, they won't learn any of them properly. As if their languages might contaminate the "real" language – in this case, German.

"That's not a thing of the past, unfortunately," says De Houwer, referring to the long-disproven idea that bilingualism might hold children back, or confuse them. In fact, research has shown that bilingual children's speech is not delayed, and their tendency to sometimes mix their languages (known as code-switching, or translanguaging) does not mean they are confusing the two. Rather, it is a sign that they are using their dual vocabulary resourcefully, picking the most appropriate words for any given context...

In 2020, a nine-year-old girl was reprimanded by her teacher for speaking Turkish to her friend in the playground of their school in Germany. As punishment, she was ordered to write an essay titled: "Why we speak German in school." The resulting essay included lines such as: "We are not allowed to speak our mother tongue. So that we improve our German". Her family made a formal complaint with the support of a lawyer, who questioned whether a child speaking English during breaktime would have been punished in the same way. There is a saying among Germans of Turkish ancestry: Turkish isn't a language you learn, Turkish is a language you forget as quickly as possible.

When my hometown in Germany, Düsseldorf, put up a street sign in Arabic as part of a celebration of multilingualism, it was smeared with racist graffiti, and attracted online comments demanding that "they" should learn German. While a street sign in Japanese that was put up at the same time was fine.

What explains this dramatic difference in how languages are valued?

Research suggests that it's often not about the languages at all – but about social attitudes, especially to immigration.

"[In Germany] immigration is still viewed as the exception to the rule, as not normal. Children who speak another language at home are seen as children who don't speak German at home," Mark Terkessidis, a well-known author in the field of migration and racism studies and member of the Academie der Künste der Welt, the academy of the arts of the world. "So when these kids come to school there's a focus on the deficit and not on the resource."

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