Peppa Pig's Mummy had a Baby!!!

Under normal circumstances, this piece of news would have been of no importance to me whatsoever. Pep-pa Pig is a character in a cartoon about a family of pigs, and I am a grown-up language trainer!

Please let me explain. Recently, I flew to Lithuania to stay with my son, his Lithuanian wife and their two children aged 6 and 4. Both children are bilingual, and as a lin-guist, I am so delighted that they have been given this gift.

During my short stay, I came into contact with more Lithuanian chil-dren and was

pleasantly shocked to discover how competent six-year-olds were in English. Moreover, at age eleven, many kids were well on their way to fluency. I even met a pair of three-year-old twins who spoke exactly like Peppa Pig, exclaiming “Oh dear!” when things went wrong. It was hilarious. I listened, staggered, as these children even played together in English! I was more than curious.

From the age of three, children in Lithuania receive English lessons, but the biggest contributor to their ex-cellent language competence is car-toons, both British and American and especially Peppa Pig!

This programme used to annoy me so much, but my own kids loved it, and now my grandchildren and even their parents seem to enjoy it as much as the kids; they’re all “jumping in muddy puddles”!

I am very aware that there is a massive move towards reducing the amount of screen time which chil-dren have these days, and I am in full agreement. I have seen firsthand how scrolling leads to oversti-mulation; I have witnessed the worst tantrums when addicted little zombies can no longer watch what they want exactly when they want it. However, it seems that there is still a place for well-thought-out children’s television. And it seems that Peppa Pig is helping children acquire a lan-guage.

When I think of foreign language training for children in the UK, I truly despair.

Children leave primary school with the slightest smattering of French; if they are lucky, they will probably know their colours and the days of the week.

When they move to secondary school, they are suddenly bom-barded with two languages and if Latin is on the menu, then three. For many, this spells doom from the start. I feel so sad when I hear British children and adults informing me

that they hate Spanish or they want to drop French as soon as possible, and German is rarely taught these days because kids don’t want to

study it!

I wonder what would have happened if there had been a Spanish or French cartoon channel when my kids were small. Would I have wel-comed it with open arms and sat my children in front of it? I think I would have done so, with time limits, of course. I would have found great joy in the fact that they were absorbing a language while having fun. When my daughter was young, she was a fan of Dora the Explorer and would shout “salta salta” whenever she dived off the sofa. Sadly, I think they were the only words of Spanish in the whole cartoon. My research has now shown me that you can watch Peppa Pig in both European and Latin American Spanish on platforms such as Netflix.

In fact it is shown in over 140 countries in 80 different languages. And did you know that the speed of speech can be slowed down to 75 or 50%? That’s a game-changer for me. So, who knows? I might be “jumping in Spanish and French muddy pud-dles” too. I’m definitely going to try it out.

My dream would be for the BBC to introduce a language-learning chan-nel including kids’ cartoons and language programmes specifically for learners. How great would that be? However, in this economic cli-mate, I don’t hold out much hope.

We get the odd foreign film on the normal BBC channels with subtitles, but at full speed. Better than nothing at all.

There is something called “The Peppa Pig Effect” in America, where young

children speak with a British accent through watching the programme.

So, the fact that Peppa Pig’s mummy had a baby is not so trivial after all, and now I understand why it was big news and even announced on the BBC children’s news programme. And just to let you know, the baby’s name was...Evie.

Sharyn Collins