Prejudice against plurilinguals by monolinguals?

[Bonsoir]

I live in a plurilingual sort of environment and have done for much of my life. Bringing up my DD bilingually, I have become aware of a great deal of prejudice against bilinguals and plurilingualism by monolinguals. Has anyone else encountered this? Do you think it is fueled by fear? Ignorance? Envy?

I agree that four languages - usually meaning two home languages, a community language and a school language - tends to result in no dominant/fluent mother-tongue standard language. Even trilingualism is very hard to pull off, judging from the - highly informed and resourced - families around me.

Going back to the original question of the OP, I haven't seen that type of prejudice in Dutch education. English is a core subject. The students in the bilingual stream obviously score higher in this subject generally, though not always as you always end up with some students who are there because their parents or they themselves want to be doing it even if they're not up to it.

All students have to have a suffi ient levels in the core subjects (Eng lo ish, Dutch, maths) to pass the year, otherwise they have to be discussed at report meetings (at my school anyway). Other MFL (French, Spanish, German, Chinese) are together in a group and only one can be used for compensation for a failing grade ina nother area (e.g. a humanity or science).

I think it's so sad that anyone would run down the achievements of other students to try and benefit others/their own kids. I speak better Dutch than some of my international students who've been in the Netherlands for longer than me,but that's because I've worked bloody hard at it over the last 7 years and I make the effort to practice (not at home..DH and I always speak English together). I think I stopped asking the question, "Do you speak English?" after living here for 6 months and wouldn't let people switch to English because I knew otherwise I'd never learn.

I think that the Dutch have a high appreciation of MFL fluency and have no pretensions to get by in the world with just their own language, and therefore have no interest in doing down plurilinguals!

I agree bonsoir . Even my MIL and FIL were won over after initial reservations when we said we were going to raise DS bilingually (MIL actually asked what the point was when we only went to the UK 3 or 4 times a year). I think MIL now sees it as a point to use with her hyper competitive Dsis who is always boasting about her DGCs achievements!

this is very interesting.
my dc are bilingual, but now that dc are in school we discover how hard work it is to maintain the 'mother tongue' (both dh and I speak the same language).
we use dvd's, language playdates, holidays with family, workbooks. but it's tough and sometimes I feel we are punishing dc with extra work after a long school day.
they speak well, but their grammar is horrible

we want to keep it up, we don't know if we might move back and maybe the dc want to go to university there (atm it would be much much cheaper).

in germany there used to be a real problem with migrant children. their parents have been told to only speak german with the dc in preperation for school. the result was that these children were not able to speak both their mother language nor german properly and the schooling results were very bad as well.

wrt predjudice - not so much for our languages, as they are quite popular. but other less popular (eastern european or asian) languague speakers are sometimes labled as 'stupid' or worthless.