To ask if your DC speak 2 languages please share your experience.

[AHedgehogCanNeverBeBuggered]

We're currently on holiday with PIL. They claim that DS (11 months) will NEVER speak DH's mothertongue because at home we speak English as a family and it's impossible for a child to speak a parent's language unless it's either the lingua franca of the country they live in OR the language they speak as a family.

What is your experience?

We are expats. My youngest is fully bilingual. But he has had nannies since birth who always speak to him in their mother tongue (in the country we live in). My older son can understand a lot of the other language but definitely isn't bilingual. He was born in a different country and lived there until he was 16 months. He could (at the time) understand that language as well.

My 3 dcs are bilingual...taught through medium of Welsh since nursery/reception class
I picked up a lot of the language by reading with them and understand the spoken form but not written , dh spoke to them in Welsh at home even though he'd only studied it to GCSE level and had lived outside Wales for 15 yrs
They soaked it up and swapped from English to Welsh very easily
However all at Uni outside Wales now so don't have much opportunity to speak it now except when they come home to visit

I agree they need a lot of exposure. Mine have books and DVDs galore in English (non local language). And daily interaction with me and often their GPs.

DH and I are fluent in both their languages so we each speak our native tongue at home if the D.C. Are there (if not I speak French to DH).

I know as they get older though that I'll have to really work at their English as their French school
Day is long and we know no Purr English speakers here (so bilingual children tend to play together in French)

My son will be bilingual. His father and i speak to him only in English but we live in another country so everyone else talks to him in the native language.

Up until my kids were 2.5, we lived in the UK and I spoke English to DH and the kids and DH spoke his native language to them. When they started to speak they spoke English with the odd word of DH's, but they could understand everything that DH was saying and when we moved to a country where they speak DH's language they had a bit of a head start.

Are your PILs trying to persuade you to change your at home language to their native language? I'd resist that, for two reasons. First of all, as you're not a native speaker, your children will miss out on the massive benefit of hearing their mother speaking her native language, grammatically correct and with a richer vocabulary than you could the other language, and that will hold back both languages. Second, if you and DH have spoken English since you met, switching to another language is like starting your relationship over again. It feels weird. You have to figure out how to relate. Bugger that.

If your DH speaks his language to the kids, and if you follow it up with holidays to his country and weekend school/meetups with other kids, it will come.

IME to speak a language naturally, the DC have to grow up hearing it spoken naturally in the home environment preferably.
I grew up hearing and communicating with my mum in English, in my dad's country and used his language with him and at school.
My mum made sure I mixed with other English speakers aswell.
In that country, a lot of the parents were keen for their DCs to learn English so would employ American or English nannies for their toddlers. By the time they were teenagers (my friends at school) they would sound like natives.

Thank you for all your replies!

To answer a few questions, DH speaks to DS in Hungarian (his mother tongue) and I speak English. We speak English as a family, my Hungarian is ok but not brilliant. We can't find a bilingual nursery, Hungarian isn't a common language.

We will definitely be reading plenty of books to DS in Hungarian, we've already started but as DS is only 11 months old they're fairly simple ones. He's too little for screen time but once he's older we'll let him watch cartoons etc. in Hungarian instead of English.

Maybe we can find a Hungarian au pair or nanny, that would be excellent.

My children understand Russian perfectly, but won't speak it if they have even a slightest suspicion that the person may understand English. With my mum they have to communicate in Russian, but they broke all their Russian speaking minders into speaking English.

My son isnt speaking yet (15 months) but will be raised with both Welsh and English. I don't speak Welsh but DP and his family do. He'll also be going to a Welsh medium school. We do speak mostly English in conversation but DP speaks to him in Welsh, read Welsh books and I do say the Welsh words of things I know (water, number, colours, certain animals, thank you, etc). He already recognises some Welsh words (dog and water).

As long as they're exposed to it regularly, they will pick it up.

If you speak English at home, in an English-speaking country, it will be difficult for your DS to speak his father's language fluently, yes.
Can your DH not speak his mother tongue to DS? This is more normal to raise children bilingually. DS will still learn perfect English from you and from his environment (school, nursery).
DS is only little so not too late to have a change of heart. I've found this book really useful for friends who are raising children bilingually.

www.little-linguist.co.uk/1308.html

My kids are tri lingual. I speak my language, DH speaks his and then they do English at nursery and we always speak in English outside of the house.

My kids are bilingual. We live in DH's country and speak my language (which is the easiest one in the world to have as a minority language because it's English) as a family language. I was a Sahm until the youngest was 3, and spoke/speak only English to the kids.

As the kids get older I continue to read age appropriate books to them in English every night, even though it's not usual to read a bedtime story to a 13 year old! There is a massive likelihood of language stagnating if they are only exposed to day to day routine chat at home. Reading books that are just challenging enough whilst still being enjoyable and not off putting aloud daily helps prevent this. It's quite a challenge finding the "right" books because we get through one a week on average.

I have met English parents here in Germany whose children refuse to speak English but understand it. They say their kids do swap eventually when immersed in an English speaking country visiting. I don't know how fluent they are first hand.

I know Polish parents here whose children speak no polish because the parent didn't solely speak Polish to them especially outside the home and gradually stopped using polish at all, especially after dc1 started childcare.

It is hard work bringing children up bilingual, and the less exposure they get the less likely it is.

Your best chance would be if DH, as the minority language speaker, was a Sahp.

Another thing to consider is passive bilingualism. Just by hearing parents speak the language (or reading books, or watching tv) kids will understand the language but won’t be able to speak it. I’ve seen it so many times with my kids’ friends; they understand their parents’ varous native languages and they reply in English.

Lots of informative posts on this thread.

Ime the problem for many people seems to be a very binary way of looking at languages: either you are (completely totally, in exactly the same way for both languages) bilingual or you are not-bilingual-and-there-is-no-point.

Which really, really isn't how language acquisition works. It's to do with all sorts of factors, exposure, motivation, experiences in later life.

My exposure to English in childhood was limited to the studying of Ladybird books with my mother twice a week, being made to memorise vocabulary and irregular verbs. I now teach and examine English undergraduates, I coached dd in her Shakespeare monologues when auditioning for drama school, I write my own books in English, and I tweet and MN relentlessly in English. My accent is barely noticeable and most people miss it. Because I had that motivation and made the most of later opportunities.

My own dc were brought up with a mix of languages at home, exclusively English outside the home and exclusively Swedish when visiting relatives twice a year. Their Swedish accents sound native (dd has more of a regional accent than I do), but their vocabulary (and occasionally grammar) could probably be better for their ages. A few months in the country, or a job where they needed to use it, would almost certainly sort that.

I was also taught German as a child (reading German children's books and reciting the poetry of Heine). While I have never lived in Germany, so never become a confident speaker, I can read a German novel and follow the conversations of (recently acquired) German SIL and DB without difficulty. It doesn't matter that I can't present myself as a balanced bilingual in German: it still enhances my life to an enormous extent. Everything you learn enhances your life. With the right attitude nothing is wasted.

This happened in my family. My dad didn't speak his mother tongue to me or my sister. I think he was just lazy and didn't make the effort to speak in his own language, and most of his family speak good English so there was less incentive. You really have to be committed to bilingualism IMO, especially if it's not the parents' common language. I think it's also harder when the father is the minority language speaker (unless he is a SAHD). My parents spoke English together, although my mum had spent some time in my dad's birth country and could 'get around' in the language, so it's not like she would have understood nothing.

A friend of mine has a German husband and they started off with her speaking English and him German, but they found that the kids weren't getting enough exposure to German, so she started speaking German to them as well and now only speak German at home unless they have guests.

I have one friend who if she has children wants to raise them trilingually which I hope they manage. However, I think it's going to be tricky as she and her partner communicate in English and don't speak the other's minority language.

Ghosts the trilingual thing can be done - I know an Italian mother married to a Japanese father, living in Germany. The parents speak English to one another, and their mother tongue to the children. The children go to local German school.

They are successfully bringing the children up quadrilingual (?) so far - the kids are 7 and 5. The kids can speak German, Italian and Japanese fluently and have a mostly passive understanding of English (which they'll have to learn at school anyway). The oldest can write at an age appropriate level in Japanese and German and read Italian.

However they work incredibly hard at it, and the children are both rather earnest little things who also seem to be very intelligent!

They get homeschooling packs from Japan, and the father comes home from work and effectively home schools the children in Japanese on top of their ordinary school day in German, while the mother speaks only Italian with them and does less formal activities and reads in Italian between the end of the school day and the father coming home. Apparently a lot of Japanese expats do the Japanese curriculum home schooling on top of local schooling.

The kids are delightful and very clever and accomplished, but it seems like very hard work and if they were mine I'd worry they'd burn out or rebel sooner or later!

catinasplashofsunshine - that's very impressive, especially with the different script in Japanese (and it puts my monolingual 7 and 5 year olds to shame!) Sounds like it can work if the children are receptive and the parents are willing to commit to the time and effort required.

Maybe we can find a Hungarian au pair or nanny, that would be excellent.

^

You don't need a Hungarian nanny, you have your DH. Just get him to speak to your DS all the time in Hungarian.

Bear in mind too that the older kids get, the harder language acquisition is.

Getting them to sit down and actually study a language is boring for them, if they learn it passively from an early age then it's just second nature.

You'll find that very, very few people are actually flawlessly bilingual.

What I mean by that is they may sound perfectly bilingual and seem to have the exact same ease in both, colloqualisms, etc but when you go up a level you'll see that one language has ever so slightly usurped the other, which makes sense - usually one of the languages is used at home/with one parent and the second language is used for their general lives outside the home. Even if they read and watch films etc etc in the first language, its usually that first language that becomes slightly tainted - just because they are using it in more limited/repetitive situations.

Oh shoot, I was hoping my kids would magically start talking my native language when older. We live in the UK, my husband doesn't speak my native language, neither do any friends or family (in-law). I speak in my native language to my DC and they understand it perfectly but will reply in English. I was hoping, they will just pick it up a bit more when older but sounds like I might need to up the ante, although I'm not sure how.

Long summer holiday visit to your home country honey?

@AHedgehogCanNeverBeBuggered it's a priority area for the Hungarian foreign ministry arm, so call the Embassy (or the consulate in Liverpool if you are in the north West) and ask them for advice - they're putting a lot into Hungarian language teaching and might be able to advise on au pairs etc as well

Hungarian is notoriously difficult, few foreigners tend to learn, and the current government are very concerned that second generation outside of Hungary simply aren't learning the language, which then has the potential to impact Hungary directly, because they are less likely to return etc etc

Honeybee, holidays in your home country would help tremendously. Also, if you refuse to respond to them if they don’t use your native tongue. It might seem mean, but it works. I used to have a Serbian friend who did that with her 3 kids and it worked. I used to scoff at her method, meanwhile my own kid lost his native language in 6 months when he started childcare ( he improved with summer holidays in my home country).

We're doing trilingual successful with a two year old. I speak English, DH speaks Germand she goes to a french crèche. She understands us perfectly but TBH she speaks mostly French with a smattering of English and German as she has realised that we understand her. If she's in a monolingual environment when we're on holidays she tends to speak more of that language. Your inlaws are right. Your DH will need to make a huge effort. An au pair could help alot.