parents who speak French to their tots who aren't actually French

[becstarlitsea]

pretentious, non?

I've got a friend and an acquaintance who do this. I excuse my friend on the basis that although she isn't French, her grandmother was, and my friend does speak very good French. I still think it's a bit teensy bit barmy, especially as both of her kids are so far behind in their speech development for their age (in either language) but each to their own, and no doubt they'll catch up later...

But then the acquaintance doesn't actually speak very good French - it's just about post-A-level standard. But she insists in speaking French to her kids who are all under 6. None of the kids can talk at all in either language - not un mot.

Bourgeois pushy parenting or a sensible addition to their children's cultural life? (Must admit my DSs cultural life consists of Diego and Dora marathons when I've got flu)

Ah, okay, only read the OP which didn't make it clear.

chatting to your dcs from time to time in french is not the same as speaking shit French to them as a first language.
MILFLAW I am sure you are the exception to the rule.

oops, that sounded a bit harsh, the chatting bit was about the OP, not addressed to MILFLAW. what I mean is, if your level of French is good enough then maybe it'll be fine, is she also has another parent talking to her in her maternal language.

Had you come across the idea that it wasn't recommended before?

Thanks teafortwo!

Madame, I'm really interested in the "deep grammar" theory you've mentioned, I've never heard it before. Is it Chomsky's? Or is it a recent linguistic study on children and native language acquisition? Basically the theory is that the primary carer has to speak their native language to the child or else the chid won't acquire a native language successsfully due to not picking up the "deep grammar" in the first couple of years of life? Is that the gist of it? What do they define "deep grammar" as? (If you can remember/be bothered! )

The reason I ask is that in my experience, a person with near-native competence in a second language will often have perfect grammar, in fact more correct grammar than a native speaker. From what I remember from studies on this subject, it is rather the particular "turns of phrase" that native speakers know, words that just sound right together to us (collocations) and so on that set native speakers apart from non-natives. All the language we learn from our cultural context...

I'm very sceptical about a person sho's crap at a language actually succeeding in speaking exclusively to their child in crap French or whatever all their lives tbh, it's a huge undertaking. And if a child is spoken to by a parent in their non-native language, but their whole world outside that is in their native language, including schooling, I can't see how it would be detrimental to their native language acquisition. The examples I have seen of people with no native language are people who've spend 10 years in Germany, 10 years in France and are spoken to by a parent in non-native English, that sort of situation.

And I think the reason it seems "weird" to some here is because it's a new idea to them, like a western person who's never been to India doing yoga (not as well as a person from India) must have seemed before it became the norm.

Anyway, must take dd to the park, she's getting bored! Where's Cory? I think she'd be very interested in this thread!

ulyanka - I think you are describing situations in which children are learning through the medium of a language totally divorced from any cultural context, which is sadly often the case in so-called "international" schools teaching through an English-language medium.

I personally don't think this is a desirable educational environment and can lead to the situation you describe, when children gain mastery of no language/culture but can jabber away in several languages, unaware of their limitations.

This went from me being miss judgey pants into an interesting debate - hurrah! Have seen so many threads go the opposite way...

D'ya know the suggestion that perhaps acq. was only pretending that she speaks French to them all the time is actually quite likely from other things she's said (eg that she runs a successful multinational company from home which turned out to mean that she sells things on ebay)

Sorry, not had time to read through thread but have just one point to make.....

Dora The Explorer! My 4yo now claims not to speak Spanish but she does speak Dora! Constantly comes out with phrases and then translates for me. Not through any parental encouragement.

Becstar, she sounds v insecure, best avoided probably!

Interesting that linguistic competitiveness is found in the UK too though. I have seen a lot of it here in France, with parents prepared to go to extreme lengths to expose their children to English, but I haven't seen much of it in the UK.

"
I personally don't think this is a desirable educational environment and can lead to the situation you describe, when children gain mastery of no language/culture but can jabber away in several languages, unaware of their limitations."

I don't understand this at all! of course there are benefits to being able to "jabber away" in imperfect french or whatever! If it means they can make themselves understood and converse a bit with a native speaker then how on earth can it be bad? It'll give them a launching pad, an interest to take it further.

Isn't an imperfect effort better than no effort at all?

and they will know their limitations soon enough if they take languages in formal education, or if they choose to live abroad. and their skills can be polished off then

Depends. We live in a French-speaking country, I'm bilingual (in all modesty but have spent all of my life in French-speaking countries - does Canada count? lol!) and dc go to local schools. We speak in French in public so as not to draw attention to ourselves as expats. If we lived in England, though, it would be pretentious.

In the case of the OP, I can't see how it benefits the children to be spoken to in bad French - what are they going to learn? And it is pretentious and silly.

I don't think the concept of teaching your child two languages (or more) is weird at all and everything suggests that it is beneficial. But that is different to speaking to them exclusively in another language, a language that is not your own. That feels instinctively contrary to ~something. I don't know what - there's something swirling around in my brain about "mother" tongues, but I'm not sure how well I can articulate it.

My ds is not acquiring perfect grammar from his father - far from it, probably - but he is learning the instinctive rhythms and patterns of speech and language. He's learning context - he uses his southern French accent when he is playing with his cousins in Toulon, but when he is with Tante Marise in Paris, he shakes off l'accent du sud. His French great grandmother is 100, and peppers her speech with the Provencal that she grew up with. When ds's father speaks to him with the odd words of Provencal he knows, he's not thinking about it in any particular way, he's just continuing the oral history of his family, but it makes me smile to see my three year old running around shouting "Que fa, papa?" Or to hear DH riffing around and making up nonsense words or sentences, as we all do instinctively to make things funny or silly for our children.

I suppose my point is that language is more than just having an absolute grasp on the subjunctive. When you are speaking to your child in your mother tongue, you are passing on more than just words. So to not do that, seems as though one is withholding something quite precious.

I think that's why it feels a bit strange to me. But your mileage might vary, and each to their own, and chacun à son goût, and all of those other sayings to indicate that it really is none of my beeswax.

Lol at "successful international business" OP, she's starting to sound like Del Boy!

I'm here!

Having brought up two bilingual children, led NCT groups for foreign parents, spent many years working in the language department of my local university that and having myself (for unrelated research reasons) read a fair wodge of the literature on bilingualism - I have to say, I am becoming less and less convinced that there really are any rules to bilingualism.

The books that tell you that you have to use this or that method (the OPOL being the most popular) invariably turn out not to have been written by linguists from research on a statistically representative sample, but by parents who have tried one method, which has worked for them, and therefore assume that this is what you have to do. I have never seen any recommendations in a work written by genuine professionals specialising in bilingualism. Linguists don't tend to do recommendations; they know too much about the enormous variability of human linguistic experience.

I learnt English as a child partly from my non-native-speaking mother (who had visisted the UK 20 years previously), partly from Sir Walter Scott. This does not mean that I have difficulties communicating with RL English people as an adult, or that I sound that like an early 19th century romance. Tush! and Pshaw!, as Cedric the Saxon would have put it.

Most people are continuously adjusting their language to their environment anyway. Most of my adjusting was done visiting England as a teenager, but a fair bit happened after I met dh. The one person I do not sound like is my mother (her English is good, but rather posh and antiquated for my purposes).

Come to think of it, I don't sound like my parents when I speak Swedish either. And dh doesn't sound like his Mum and Dad. Dd's Swedish is far more modern and colloquial than mine.

As for people telling established bilinguals that they can't possibly use the language patterns they want because it wouldn't "feel" right - isn't that for the people themselves to say? Wasn't the whole problems with the OPs friend that she tried to barge into the OPs life and tell her what to do?

Yet it's not many days since a poster on the bilingualism thread told me that I will not be able to carry on speaking both English (not my native language) and Swedish to my children as their language develops because it won't "feel" right. I pointed out that my eldest is 13, so presumably any feelings we were going to have about it should have manifested themselves by now. It is possible to have a close emotional relationship to another culture- and it's equally possible to have been born and brought up in a culture and still know sod-all about it (No dh, of course I'm not looking at you ).

Imo it's like any other aspect of parenting- it's what works for you.

From my own experience of NCT groups, minority-language mothers married to majority-language fathers have tended to fall into two groups: the ones that speak the majority language to their children despite it not being their native language and the ones that manage to speak enough of their native language to establish a bilingual household. I have never noticed any difficulties with the majority language in either case, nothing to suggest that those who have spoken English with a non-native parent are in any way disadvantaged as far as their English goes.

My best friend grew up with Finnish parents who spoke extremely poor Swedish and communicated for much of the time in Finnish. Yet as an adult, she is, as far as anyone can make out, a native Swedish speaker, who regretfully admits that her Finnish is not really as good as she would like it. Clearly for her, the influences of school, friends, boyfriends etc were more important in the long run. She hasn't got a trace of a Finnish accent. This despite the fact that she had an extremely good relationship to her parents and her father is still living. Life is a complex thing.

correction: whole problem, not problems

have to be careful on these linguistic threads

now I wish there was a fool-proof way of imparting typing skills to the rising generation

I mentioned this thread to my mum, and she said that she would like to make it known to Mumsnet in her own justification that my dad did not speak more than a couple of phrases in Italian, and she thought it was unfair for her to talk to her daughters in a language that her husband couldn't understand.

But she loves the description of the family as being semiotic guinea pigs!

pispirispis Fri 13-Nov-09 23:50:29

"I also think it's virtually impossible to have two completely native languages."

Not sure about this one tbh. I asked dd (13) just now which is her native language and she just looked at me in that teen way with raised eyebrows. The truth is we don't know which language we spoke to her first in- depends on whether it was dh or me who first got a word in, we'd be talking about split seconds. She has had consistent access to two languages since the delivery room. She thinks in two languages, dreams in two languages, argues in two languages. Deciding that we're going to call one her native language and the other an acquired language seems a bit pointless; she has never known anything other than bilingualism.

And then again, there is my brother who spoke Korean until he was 2.6, was then adopted into a Swedish family and never heard another word of Korean again (not easy to arrange in those days, though my parents would have been keen); his Korean is now totally gone. There is no perceptible difference between his Swedish and that of his monolingual siblings. So which would you say was his native language: the one he speaks or the one he has forgotten? Or would you say he hasn't got a native language, just because it doesn't fit the ideas of how a native language should be acquired?

My bilingual dcs started speaking earlier than their monolingual cousins fwiw.

cory regarding your comment about learning English from a non-English speaking parent...

You remind me of a mate I had in Manchester. His mum was Spanish and had dreadful English, his dad was Irish with an incredibly strong accent and use of dialect. My mate, like the rest of us, spoke broad Mancunian. Which he clearly hadn't learned from either parent.

I'm also reminded me of the hundreds of thousands of first generation British Asians in this country whose parents either don't both speak English, or don't speak it much in the home, or who speak it with a strong. And yet those kids grow up British, speaking perfect English.

So yeah, I doubt it really makes a difference. Kids are learning machines, and self-correcting, after all.

Hi Cory,

I guess I was exaggerating a bit there. What I should have said was that I think it's quite rare, and that most bilingual people have one native language and one very near-native one.

I think it's only reasonable if one or both parents are native speakers, otherwise it's just ridiculous. My dd is trilingual... English, another European language and gibberish and without the foreign language would not be able to communicate with her granny who she adores. But I would never speak a language to her that has no cultural meaning to us (or whatever) (Besides, my French is shite)

Oh and Cory, I would say your brother's native language is definitely Swedish! I would judge being a native speaker by the standard to which the person speaks the language rather than the person's country of origin. Btw I really enjoyed reading about your linguistic background, and from what I've read in other threads your children sound lovely and bright as buttons!

I find this hard to describe, but to try and give some examples, I know bilingual people who you would think are native English speakers if you chat to them for a while. However, they do make the very occasional grammatical error that a native speaker would never make. Of course native speakers make grammatical errors too, but they're often a different type of error imo.

For example, whereas a native speaker might make an error like "less than 100 people" or "there's loads of people in the park", a near-native speaker might make the odd error like "We had problems to find our way back" or they might have problems using the more obscure multi-word verbs or in using and understanding common idiomatic expressions from the culture of their second language due to a lack of exposure to them. For example I wouldn't expect my dd to know as many British idioms as me in the future because she doesn't live in the UK, even if I always speak to her in English.

The bilingual friends I'm referring to here would tell you themselves that they are more confident in one language than in the other, and that one is completely native, the other nearly. I think that is true in many cases because mostly people don't have the advantage of being able to have enough exposure in both languages throughout their lives to make them completely native speakers in both.

I don't know if I've explained that well or used good examples, it's certainly hard to describe the difference between a native and near-native speaker! Very interesting though...

"I think that is true in many cases because mostly people don't have the advantage of being able to have enough exposure in both languages throughout their lives to make them completely native speakers in both."

I agree that exposure to language is key; certainly, bringing up my DD to be bilingual, I am highly aware that she needs to have a full and equivalent range of life experiences in both languages/cultures and I do my utmost to provide this, but realise that it may prove more and more difficult as time goes by.

I am not personally at all convinced that an English child living in England being spoken to for a small percentage of his/her time in broken French by one parent will gain anything from this at all, linguistically. On the contrary, I fear it may be harmful.

I don't get this idea of harmful. As if language were a precious china vase that must not get broken in the wrong hands. Instead of something that can go on evolving over your lifetime if you develop an interest. The English I was taught by my mother as a child was not the full linguistic range, but it proved the foundations on which I could build as I grew up.

She also taught my brother German- and I don't think her German was anywhere near as good as her English at the time. But he has gone on to teach at a German university and develop native-like competence, so I really can't see what harm has been done. My German is less good- accent not perfect, but it has still been an immense advantage to me in my work to have that basic knowledge; the alternative would have been to have remained like most of my academic colleagues and know no German at all. I really don't see how that would have been an advantage.

I think the problem with our attitudes to bilingualism is we are constantly frightened- frightened of not achieving perfection, so we feel it is safer not to do anything at all than to do something that is not perfect.

I have seen children grow up with dreadful English, because their mother spoke dreadful broken English to them, and they have never learnt to correct it as adults - it got "set in" badly.

It's the old half full/half empty thing.

Going off slightly at a tangent here, lots of people I've met seem to think that if a person does not have exactly the same abilities in their two languages, that is a sign that bilingualism has failed (and by implication that they would have been better off as monolinguals).

For instance, dd can talk about boats and sailing in Swedish but not in English, as she has only ever dealt with those things in Sweden. So you might think that this is a case of imperfect bilingualism- she isn't fully bilingual then, is she? But what about her monolingual English friends?- they can't talk about those subjects either, because they haven't got that particular vocabulary, being a bunch of landlubbers. But noone suggests they are less than fully monolingual. So by adding something to the default position, dd is seen as somehow having less.

I worked for several years as an archaeologist when I first arrived in the UK. This means I can converse intelligently about archaeology in English, but not in my native language; I don't have the technical jargon, I don't know how Swedish archaeologists talk. Does this suddenly make me a non-native speaker of Swedish? Bearing in mind that about 9 million other Swedes probably can't talk intelligently about this subject either.

Archaeology and sailing may seem very specialised and small areas, but there are far more central areas that I have never dealt with in my native tongue (and might never have got to deal with, had I stayed a monolingual). I have never made love in my native tongue- does that make me a semi-lingual or simply put me on a par with the (possibly not very numerous) Swedish virgins? I have never used pregnancy-related Swedish (but neither have my monolingual childless friends), I have never attended toddler groups in my native tongue.

Even if a person does grow up making the odd grammatical error as pispiripis' post, does that negate the value of all the added communication they have access to by having another language? Personally, I'd rather be able to talk to someone even if they did make errors, than not be able to talk to them.

What harm do you come to by making grammatical errors or speaking in a less than perfect accent? In many countries, it is normal to speak three or four languages, some of which you use for everyday purposes, others for more specialised purposes- can anyone prove that this harms the natives of those countries?

cory - you are intelligent enough not to need an explanation as to why very imprecise language acquisition hinders learning, aren't you?