Mumsnet Talk

DD1, 2.7 years.

DH and I are English and living in Spain, so of course we speak English at home and DD speaks Spanish at nursery. Nursery tell me her Spanish is really good, good vocab, long phrases and speaking clearly with good pronunciation and ahead of many of her friends. We don't hear her speak much Spanish now as she now understands who to speak each language to.

However, she does not like situations when English and Spanish are spoken in the same place. She gets upset when I speak Spanish to friends and then speak in English to her. In social contexts now she isn't speaking at all, she doesn't like hearing the two languages in the same place, if you see what I mean. At the playground during the weekend she got really cross everytime I spoke to a child or another adult in Spanish.

Has anyone else had this problem? Did your child just get used to it in the end?

Ds was a bit funny about the bilingual situation when he was little. In fact, he went through a stage around age 3 where he refused to speak English at all after having been on holiday in Sweden.

He started by saying "I have forgotten all my English" - which was obviously not true as he understood it perfectly well.

Then he said "if you speak English, trolls come and eat you up" ( were walking through Kensington at the time and I pointed out to him the crowds of people who had manifestly not been eaten by trolls!).

Then he said "it is not my language". And there I think lay the crux. He was uncomfortable by the whole idea of having two languages and two cultures and not knowing who he was. He was also shy and used language refusal to get out of having to speak at all. And he is the kind of person who is worried about being different: he objected to being bilingual in much the same way as he later objected to my wearing a non-fashionable coat.

The good news is that he did grow out of it, by the time he started school he was speaking both languages.

By the time he was 10 he started insisting on my speaking Swedish when I walked him to school, as I sometimes did. I was a bit miffed and wondered if he was embarrassed about my accent (which is actually pretty good). "No mum, he explained, but if you speak English people can understand what you say."

Which kind of goes to show that you can't win with one of these kids who think their parents are a perpetual embarrassment.

But persevere with the language; she'll get used to it.

That is really common at that age. Children associate the language with the person.

It can be particularly difficult when one language is a signed one and one parent is deaf.