DS is 18 months and talks, a lot! But not any language known to me:)! It's constant and it's like an actual full conversation with hand gestures and everything - very funny. He doesn't say many words yet. So far I've counted 5 or 6: Oorge (= Curious George), Haahoo (from in the nightgarden), baaboo (= boobie), Daddy, bubble and then he does "broombroom" for a car. He is trilingual and I'm a little concerned that all the words he's said so far are in English (I.e. Not mine or DH's mother tongue)..
Anyway, I'm fairly confident in his social and communication skills even though I'm aware of the fact that he doesn't yet say many actual words. He is very sociable and friendly and smiles a lot and very eager to make friends. He also loves singing dancing and can do the games to many of the nursery rhymes like Twinkle twinkle, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Roly Poly, Sleeping Bunnies etc.
What I wonder about is this gibberish language he speaks. I speak it back to him a lot and I'm now wondering if it'll just confuse him and that he might actually think I understand what he's "saying" and that it's a real language. He now speaks it even to strangers when we're out and about. I do of course speak my language to him and I read to him in my language and when we're out walking I might stop to show him things like a tree and say things like "look a tree. The tree is very big" etc. But when he spontaneously starts talkimg his language to me, I often reply imitating the sounds he makes just for the fun of it and I'm now wondering if I'm making it more difficult for him to learn real language..
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Behaviour/development
Talking gibberish with your toddler - is it ok?
Fazerina · 08/11/2012 23:33
From what I know, children in multi-lingual homes can sometimes take a little longer to get going with their language, but once they do they will catch up fine with all of them. The important thing is that he is clearly exploring language and speech sounds, and wants to be communicative. He sounds like a real little character! 
Hey again and many thanks for all your replies and for the book recommendations, I will definately have a look!
Char11 there was a speech and language therapist in my local children's centre one time and I asked about the claim I had heard before that multilingual children would start later with their speech. She said they no longer believe this and that a child, who starts slower would do so regardeless of how many languages s/he has to learn. It does make sense, as she explained that children don't generally think of learning to talk as learning 1, 2, 3 or more different languages. To them it's just just learning to speak. When they get older, depending on how the language has been acquired, i.e if their parents confused them by mixing languages (e.g. one parent doesn't only speak one set language to the child) etc., they may have varying degrees of problems, but not generally at the early stages.
On the DS being a character-front, tell me about it! Up until now he has called both myself and DH 'Daddy', I guess to him we're like one unit IYSWIM (he calls himself Oh-Oh
), but recently he has started calling any stranger, who might even remotely resemble DH 'Daddy', which has lead to some amusing situations when we're out and about 
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