Multilingual picture books – an analysis of language, content and poetic intention

In the past decades, the publishing industry has begun to recognise what Adichie calls ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. Since then, while picturebooks featuring children from a more diverse range of ethnicities and abilities/disabilities are beginning to get a stronger foothold, linguistic diversity remains somewhat elusive, especially outside the realm of dual language picturebooks, and the inclusion of Spanish in picturebooks in the United States. Specifically, the market of picturebooks that includes multiple languages remains vanishingly small, even though many children’s realities include them encountering a wide variety of languages within the family circle or at school. This paper addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of seven picturebooks that, at a minimum, include three or more languages. Analysing the picturebooks from four interlinked perspectives – a linguistic analysis, a multimodal analysis, a content analysis, and an analysis of ‘poetic intention’, drawing on Glissant’s work in postcolonial studies, the paper makes a contribution to our understanding of multilingual picturebooks, offering a new framework and guiding questions to facilitate analysis of the field.