When adults validate and celebrate children’s diverse language abilities, they create more productive and engaging learning environments. These abilities include language mixing and innovation.In short, flexible multilingualism contributes to the vitality of diverse mother languages and brings tangible benefits to language learners.

My own research with Tibetan families living in urban centres shows that parents encourage children to speak a standard language rather than their regional mother language. Despite the significance of regionally diverse mother languages to adults’ identities, Tibetan communities face pressure to unify heritage language learning around a single standard variety.In this case, language standardization has prevented Tibetan children from accessing forms of linguistic belonging available to adults. It has also unintentionally contributed to a language shift away from Tibetan mother languages and to dominant languages, including Mandarin and English.In such situations, immigrant and minority children face two forms of linguistic marginalization. First, a nation’s official languages exclude their recognized heritage language. Second, a standard language spoken within their community excludes their native, mother languages.