From There To Here
Antonella Sorace · 47 min
A world-leading linguist and mother of bilingual children dismantles decades of myth to reveal why every migrant's home language is a hidden superpower.
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Professor Antonella Sorace has spent her career dismantling one myth after another about bilingualism. The most damaging one is still the oldest: that bilingual children get confused, that they should learn one language first, that mixing languages means they do not know either one properly. She explains that when children mix languages, they are following grammatical rules and demonstrating knowledge of both. Mixing is not confusion. It is competence.
What Antonella has discovered through her research and lived experience raising bilingual children is that being bilingual rewires how you think. All your languages stay active in your mind at once, and managing them requires constant cognitive work. You cannot switch off a language. That effort carries into everyday life, shaping your ability to shift attention, adapt to change, and understand that other people see the world differently than you do. A bilingual child often grasps this perspective-taking earlier than a monolingual child, and that advantage stays with them for life.
But Antonella is also clear: these benefits are not automatic. They depend on exposure, on attitudes toward both languages, on whether the languages are similar to each other, and on context. Being bilingual means different things for different people. And she is frank about the scale of the challenge ahead. Without deliberate effort to maintain minority languages, without the right information reaching families and communities, about half the world's languages may be dead by the end of the century. The loss would be enormous. Language is not just words. It is culture, perspective, and a way of understanding what it means to be human.
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