At a festival in Reading, a nine-year-old girl named Amara traced her finger over a page of a book written in both English and Farsi, reading aloud with her grandmother. The room buzzed with similar scenes—children flipping through bilingual picture books, parents murmuring stories in Arabic, French, and Portuguese. This wasn’t just story time. It was a quiet revolution in how we think about reading.
In a country where nearly one in four elementary school children speaks a language other than English at home, reading in a family’s native tongue isn’t a barrier—it’s a bridge. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust found that multilingual readers in the U.K. are far more likely to enjoy reading and do it daily. Of those who speak more than one language at home, 77% said they enjoy reading, compared to just 49% of children who only use English. Half of multilingual readers pick up a book every day, while only 29% of their monolingual peers do.
The benefits go beyond numbers. When parents read in their strongest language, they can ask deeper questions, explain tricky words, and connect stories to family memories. One study showed that Latine parents used richer, more varied Spanish when reading bilingual books than they did with English-only texts. For families, reading in a heritage language keeps culture alive—it’s how grandparents pass down traditions, and how children feel rooted in their identity.
Yet only a small fraction of children’s books in the U.K. are translated. French and Japanese dominate the market, while hundreds of other languages spoken in British homes—like Punjabi, Somali, and Tamil—rarely appear in print. At the Reading festival, a class of third graders proved it doesn’t take fluency to make translation joyful. Without knowing a word of Portuguese, they worked together to creatively translate a picture book, guided by images and emotion.
Bilingual books and multilingual story times don’t just help non-English-speaking families—they enrich everyone. They invite all children to explore new sounds, scripts, and stories. Publishers are beginning to see that looking beyond English isn’t just inclusive—it’s essential for a truly diverse world of children’s literature. As one young translator put it: “I didn’t just read the story. I lived it.”