Hello,
I was wondering if there are any adopters out there who speak a language other than English?
DP and I are both from abroad and whereas I grew up bilingually (one of the languages being English), DP is very fluent in English but it is noticeably a second language.
We have one birth DS who will be starting school this year. Currently we speak the other language at home, and English whenever we are out of the house/with other people. DS' English is already better than the other language, so we make an extra effort to keep the other language alive/develop it. Such as books, DVDs, spending lots of time with grandparents, trying to be very consistent about speaking other language at home.
One set of DS' grandparents speaks very little English.
We have been asked by SW to think about how we would deal with the language issue. We are looking to adopt in the age range of 0-2 and would consider concurrency as an option.
On the one hand, if a 2yo would join our family I suppose we could not keep on what we're doing, i.e. speaking the other language at home, as poor AC, having moved to a strange new home, would not understand a thing and feel further isolated, bewildered, estranged… So we would have to speak English at home at least initially.
On the other hand, it is important to us that all our children, by birth or adoption, can communicate with their grandparents, and we would definitely not want there to be a distinction such as BC speaks other language, AC does not. So in the mid- to long term, we would want AC to learn the other language.
Has anyone been in a similar situation? Any ideas how/when to introduce a new language to a child who may have some active speech already, and certainly some understanding of language?
The other issue is if we were to have a concurrency placement. Most likely a very young baby, with the possibility that baby returns home to BM. My initial hunch would be to do as we did with DS - lots of exposure to both languages, so, say, alternating lullabies, talking to AC in both languages, taking them to activities out of the house which would obviously be in English, etc. But DP worries that SW would frown upon this plan - if baby were to go home to BM, baby's speech development may be a bit delayed (as it can be in bilingually raised children) due to us confusing baby in the early months. Bilingually raised children usually catch up after a while, say by age 5 or 6, and the downside of the delay is more than compensated by their having two languages. However a baby exposed to two languages in the early months but then not anymore (due to returning home) might have the delay to deal with, without the advantage of having a second language.
I would appreciate any thoughts on these issues! I did do some research in bilinguality forums and journals but have found very little relating to adoption (except adopting from abroad), and what I found was mostly useless.
(There is obviously the similar but different situation of adopting from abroad, but I guess it is different in that a) babies tend to be quite young, b) there usually is no plan for them to keep their original language, and c) though they are confronted with a whole new language, this new language will be their only language, whereas we want/need to keep both languages going.)