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)

This is an interesting thread for me.
I was brought up being exposed to three languages, none of which is The Queen's English as she is spoke in England, but rather Hibernian English which is not the same thing at all.. My Dh IS English and he sometimes feels like he's in a foreign country here in Ireland - well, technically he is...

My DD has just started school and spends a large portion of the day learning through Irish, and she also learns French, but not at total immersion level.

We speak Dora quite well also, and also a little bit of Sanskrit,(root words) as this is on the Irish course for the advanced leaving certificate level - my Irish teacher in school was a native Irish speaker and had studied Linguistics, so he wasn't actually a Irish language teacher per se.

My DH has a few words of Norwegian, I have a smattering of Dutch, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese which we like to throw into the mix, and we babble a lot in made up languages, where intonation is the key.

We used sign language with DD from an early age as well, (and there were some raised eyebrows at that!)(BTW, we had no terrible two tantrums, as DD could 'tell' us what she wanted and how she was doing.)

We also sing a lot together in all the languages we can and recite poetry too, to get the feel of rhyming and rhythm. Dd is very good at doggerel as a result I think!

Now, Dd and I can talk about DH in Irish , her vocab is pretty strong in French, and we sing a lot of songs in French - her accent is very good - partly because I had a teacher who was not afraid of giving it wellie in class and spitting all over the front row and I follow suit.

Wherever I am I dream in the language of that country. When I was in total immersion Irish college during my school summers I would dream in Irish, when in France, I do as the french do etc..

I consider the brain rather plastic, (mine maybe more than a little porous also!) and think that the more languages the merrier. There are many people in the world, many songs, and it's lovely to be able to think, speak and sing in another language - the brain works in a different way and allows for greater lyrical flux.

When in Nursery DD picked up a bit of Chinese from one of the little boys there - she just flicked a switch in her brain to talk with him - like a change from major to minor key in music. I thought this was cool, as I didn't pick up a word of it when I worked over in that part of the world - I just couldn't get the ng sound or the intonation. The shame

Oh look, what fun, I've just noticed that there is a new emoticon - hurray
Humm.. Jammy Dodger or the Eye of Sauron eh?

MIFLAW, a tad rude to a) get my name wrong and b) dismiss my offering, which at the time I said was not the greatest, but it was relevant as I was discussing deep grammar at the time.

If you want to be a purist to the point of boorishness then fine, but it doesn't really add up to a hill of beans, does it?

How about you produce some data proving what you are doing is a good thing, eh?

MadameDefarge

Sorry I got your name wrong - as it was not on the current page I typed it from memory.

I don't think I did dismiss your research - I questioned its relevance. You may have been "discussing deep grammar at the time" but you clearly addressed this specifically to my situation, saying:

"But given current thinking, it is considered not a good idea (for all the deep grammar issues mentioned)."

so I think it's only fair to unpick its relevance (or otherwise) to my own sitaution.

As you know, the thrust of Chomsky's work is about the nature of language per se and how we acquire language AT ALL, rather than bilingualism. It is also purely theory. Yet you apply it to my situation as if it is immediately relevant and as if it is fact.

You also call it "current thinking" - if I'm not mistaken, Chomsky's theory on deep structure first made an appearance in the late 1960s (though I admit I'm guessing and it could be a decade either way) - not what I would call "current" in the context of a fast-moving field like multilingualism.

As for whether what I'm doing is a good thing, of course that's impossible, because only you can decide whether it's "good". What I can do - and already have done - is provide an example of a sustained case study whereby someone in a very similar position has done the same thing, made it work, and published academically-rigorous findings on the experiment. The author in question is George Saunders (not to be confused with the novelist of the same name), a German lecturer at the university of Tasmania, who brought up three children to be bilingual in German and (Australian) English. Not only did he publish two books on the subject, he went on to found the Multilingual family newsletter which continues to this day as a reference point for native and non-native multilingual families alike.

My purism and (tongue in cheek) boorishness, FWIW, are directed at some of the people that this thread attacks. Unlike the OP, however, I do not feel it my place to make a blanket judgement on them - and I would certainly never condemn them as "harming" their children without proper evidence, as some people here have.

sorry again about the name.

Sorry, "main thrust".

Pitchonette it's highly unfortunate that your French friend met an SLT who is working outside of our professional guidelines. I can tell you that it would not happen in our trust which is highly multilingual. To be honest, we'd be strung up for even suggesting it. RCSLT guidelines are quite clear regarding bilingualism.

80% of my caseload is bilingual and fluency in both/either/all languages varies immensely depending on individual factors as you say - but here, individual difference does not refer to children exposed to random foreign words willy nilly with no commmunicative purpose, we are talking about children who are living in complex linguistic environments. That is natural. For me to decide to talk to my child in my school German because I feel it will make them bilingual is not natural and is a waste of precious time I could be spending communicating in a normal way (in whatever language comes naturally to me in the moment). It is forced, strange and pedagogic and there is no need for it.

My points were not about what I would consider to be true bilingualism which is any situation is which a child lives and learns in more than one language. To me, if the languages are not 'living languages' of the home and are being introduced like some sort of 'Baby Einstein' experiment by parents who do not use the language in question themselves, this is not a good thing. It's similar, in my opinion, to plonking a child in front of a Baby Einstein video and expecting it to accelerate their cognitive development. It goes against everything I know about language and appears to me to be wholy misguided. Whether you believe that children are 'hardwired' to learn languages or learn it behaviourally is irrelevant - this is not a natural language model, which is what the majority of quality research on bilingualism relates to.

Have been following this thread with great interest (am also linguist and languages teacher and bringing dd up in a bilingual household)

I agree with much of what all of you have said, and all of what mrsbean has said.

mrsbean

Interesting post.

What I'm not clear on, though, is this bit:

"To me, if the languages are not 'living languages' of the home"

Take a situation where two childless adults speak different languages. Quite frequently, they will choose one of those languages to communicate in. The household is therefore effectively monolingual.

If they then have a child and decide to use, for example, OPOL strategies to raise that child as bilingual, how does that fit into your model? The only reason the "minority" parent is speaking his or her language is to communicate with the child (and vice versa.)

Does that count as "living languages" and does it depend on issues of "nativeness", occasional presence of third parties, majority community language, or is it enough that one parent and one child communicate exclusively (or practically so) in that language?

Genuinely interested in your answer.

That's our situation - we were a monolingual French-speaking family until DD came along (everyone spoke French with everyone else - DP, me, DSS1 and DSS2). Then DD arrived and I started speaking English to her - because I am English and that is the language I speak with my family, and the language DD will speak with her maternal family. English very much "lives" in our home - and everyone is benefiting (DP included!).

And my situation too, Anna.
Dp and I spoke Italian. Along came dd and now we do OPOL. (and yes, dp is also learning.....)

Coming later than late to this thread, but as I also live in a bilingual environment it's a subject that fascinates me.

I find a lot of the comments on here a bit extreme. I am a professional translator and can count the number of truly 100% bilingual people I know on the fingers of one hand, but the list of people who claim to be bilingual is endless. One person's definition of fluent is someone else's average. Bilingualism is so many shades of grey.

Surely what matters is an aptitude and willingness to communicate, in any language? And a desire to open up your child's mind to the world. The OP's acquaintance might just be a pretentious show-off, but then again she might have a genuine passion for languages that she wants to transmit to her kids.

I don't get this thing about having to be absolutely perfect. My son is 4 and gets the classic native-speaker input from both parents, but his English is a bit mangled. But he makes himself understood. When he goes to England he quickly stops making the mistakes he makes in Italy.

If a dad who loves football but isn't exactly David Beckham starts kicking a ball around in the park with his son, should he stop just because he's not a total pro? Does it make him pretentious?

My DP already spoke quite reasonable English before we met, but it has improved immeasurably (even though he hates to admit it) since being exposed to me speaking English to DD and the rest of my family.

That's what I would say, too.

But, until the grandparents etc visit (and not all grandparents do, or even can) the only reason the language is "living" is because one adult and the child use it.

So how is that different from a highly competent non-native speaker using the language? Are we now moving to a position that says it is competence and effort that counts rather than just "nativeness", or is there some undefinable way in which a previously unused language "lives" among natives but not among other users?

There's more to my maternal family than my parents - I have a huge family, that we see and speak to often. My parents use Skype with all their grandchildren. And we have plenty of English speaking friends too. English lives all around us.

Bonsoir

That's a fair point but I'm interested in whether that makes a difference to mrsbean's thinking.

For example, a family whose "second" language was very uncommon (e.g. Yiddish) or where there was no support network locally (e.g. Gaelic speakers living in Taiwan) or simply where the family was estranged or dead and they lived away from a major language community.

Can the parent's efforts alone create a "living language" or does it depend on this external network - and, in either case, does being a native speaker make some sort of difference and, if so, how? For example, my daughter and I actively involved in our local Francophone community but I am not a native speaker. Is our language "living2 or not, and on what basis?

MIFLAW:

RE: The only reason the "minority" parent is speaking his or her language is to communicate with the child (and vice versa.)

That's a pretty major reason to use an additional language! When I say 'functional', I don't mean merely to meet basic needs: there may be (and usually are) social, emotional and cultural functions underlying the use of different languages in the home. So if you are the 'minority' parent and you are, say, changing a child's nappy and chatting away to them, you are highly likely to instinctively do it in your mother tongue and later, even if you mostly use the majority language in the home, to use your mother tongue for different communicative functions than you might choose to use the majority language - for some people, it may be to soothe the child; for some it may be to chastise them etc, etc. (I have Asian friends who only recall ever being spoken to in Punjabi when they were poorly or being scolded!) There's also the issue of extended family and grandparents - too many children in this country lose their multilingualism because when they go to school, their exposure to their home language (which might have been the one they were most fluent in on school entry) dwindles to almost nothing. They then go to visit relatives abroad and can't speak a single word to them - what a loss that is to the relationship, and to that individual's sense of identity!

Even if you, as the parent speaking the 'minority' language, do not have relatives that your child will need to speak to, you may have certain words in your language that you need to communicate with your child that have no direct translation.
My father was a native Irish speaker (although he never spoke it to us, really) and the word that always springs to my mind is 'gaisce' (gash-kuh). It's kind of like an achievement or a big effort or display but there really is no English equivalent. Lose the meaning of the word, you lose something of your communication.

So the not-so-short answer is, there may be very good reasons that you need to work hard at maintaining bilingualism in your home and some of this may require you to make an effort... but that is still different to what I would consider 'flashcard bilingualism' where the language is supposed to convey some sort of academic benefit but isn't actually used in a relationship-building, communicative way.

You know, all of this isn't to say that I'm against the idea of teaching young kids an additional language that is not the language of the home.. I just feel there's a difference between little Johnny heading off to learn French on a Saturday and then sharing his new songs with you and babbling away at Johnny in French you can barely speak yourself because you think it might win him a few additional IQ points or make entry to Oxford a tad easier. It's a subtle point maybe, but it's much the same to me as the difference between drill-teaching vocabulary by rote and expanding vocabulary through playing and talking and sharing books together. It just sucks all the meaning out of language when it's divorced from communication.

Situations where the family minority language is only sustained by a single parent (ie there is no community component) are very difficult to uphold in the longer term ie beyond infancy. As soon as the child goes out into the wider world, the minority language tends to get squeezed out by the community language. If you want your child to continue to progress in its minority language, extended stays with family overseas are probably your only hope.

Cor Blimey things are getting a bit snipey on here, non? I have to confess that, in the situation described by the OP (or as someone put it, two Islingtonites speaking French to their child) I would yes, find it rather pretentious. But I have to say that I don't think serious harm will be done to the child. The most likely scenario is that as a teenager they might turn round and say for sake mum stop talking like that. In the (probably unlikely) event that their interest in the foreign language is highly stimulated by the 'pretentious' parent then no doubt said eager parent will fork out for them to go on language immersion trips and so forth. Or indeed a 'bilingual' school (and in my experience most pupils at 'bilingual' schools are, unlike Bonsoir*'s DD, not in the happy position of actually having parents with different native tongues). Those of us in bilingual households might feel smug at our relative good fortune (and quite frankly I feel that there is a large element of that coming through here) but decent foreign language teaching and a motivated pupil can achieve a great deal. The former might be sadly lacking in the UK but that's a different thread.

Mrsbean, but surely if you've made the huge commitment to speak to your child exclusively in a language that is not your native tongue, then that language will become a living, natural part of your home and your relationship with your child...? I think any attempt at a kind of "flashcard" "Baby Einstein" bilingualism would be doomed to failure and wouldn't last more than a few weeks anyway, because you acutally have to be really good at a language to be confident and consistent enough to communicate with your children every day in a language that is not your native tongue. Good enough to communicate feelings to your children and probably pretty passionate about the culture(s) belonging to that language.

I don't speak from personal experience here though, as I speak to my dd in my native English and her dad in his native Spanish (OPOL). But I speak to dp in Spanish as he doesn't speak English. It's not my native tongue, yet I have formed a relationship with him that I would like to be lifelong, and it feels very natural to me to communicate all my feelings in Spanish....

tsk - actually

Bonsoir, this is my experience too. I would say in practice that even with some exposure to the community component a significant amount of children lose the minority language of the home at some point.

As I'm in the position to assess the language progression of bilingual children over time, I have seen a large number of them gain proficiency in the majority language at the expense of the home language. Of course, it's difficult to generalise here totally as it must be remembered that the majority of children I see have some underlying speech and language processing difficulties, we also see a good proportion of typically developing kids who have been referred simply to check their language status e.g. where the monolingual teacher isn't sure if the child is slow to progress in English because of a normal L2 lag or if there are underlying L1 issues and I have seen the same pattern with these children.. Sometimes it's very hard to know why as Child A and Child B can appear to have very similar degrees of language exposure and apparently minimal difference in terms of their langauge and learning apparently and one may end up competent in both languages and the other in only one. (When I say competent, I mean able to communicate a message so that it makes some sense to the listener, not necessarily that it is grammatically 'perfect'). The brain is a funny thing.

Also, my cousins attended Irish immersion schools and would have been fluent at school age but tell me they have experienced a loss of this language. Although I believe that with practice, their fluency would return as all this language has been stored somewhere, both say that where once they would have thought in Irish, now they have to work hard to 'tune in' and understand Irish language on the radio or television. There is a definite element, I guess, that if you don't use it, you lose it (or at least it becomes harder to retrieve).

Sorry if I've been a bit unclear, pispirispis, I would agree totally with what you say.. I was only giving examples of some of the different ways in which people might choose to use language differently, not suggesting these were the 'right' ways or that it would be 'wrong' to communicate with your child in a language that was not your own if that was what sprung out of your lips in relation to how you were feeling at that moment.

For me, it's about authenticity - if you communicate your feelings most naturally in Spanish, even if it is your fifteenth language, and you are communicating something about your feelings to your child, you will do it in Spanish. And yet next year, that might change and you might do it in English. Language is amazing in that way - it is a very fluid thing and, truthfully, poorly understood. There are great stories that stand testament to it e.g. the woman who was uncovered as a Russian spy in Germany because she shouted out in Russian in labour, or people who revert to speaking a language they haven't spoken in years after a stroke (and I have seen this first hand!). Language is probably 'stored' slightly differently in all of our brains because of our individual experiences, which is why it is an incredibly difficult thing to study..

So my basic and most fundamental point here, and it is more a personal belief than one underpinned by a great degree of scientific evidence for, is that language is a vehicle for communication and all that entails (culture, identify, relationship). As long as language is allowed to maintain this basic integrity of purpose, I don't have a problem with how it is introduced or taught or if there are 50,000,000 languages in the home.. however, if it is used to 'hothouse' a child and is forced to exist outside of natural, authentic communication for spurious reasons, that's not a good thing. Perhaps maybe not so harmful for most, but perhaps harmful for some and unlikely to do anyone any good, for the reasons you suggest about it being a 'flash in the pan'.

mrsbean

I think that all makes a tremendous amount of sense.

It's also exactly what I do with my own child - and that covers nappies, soothing, scolding, playing, and everything else you care to name. Inevitably, too, there will, already, in her brain be words (or, more accurately, distinctions) without a direct translation into English (and vice versa). It is very definitely "actually used in a relationship-building, communicative way." As I have said before, I feel my emotional bond with her is actually the stronger for being made through a shared language, including "expanding vocabulary through playing and talking and sharing books together."

It is true that I am NOT in the position of "babbling away at Johnny in French you can barely speak yourself" - I am highly proficient in French, though obviously not perfect - but nonetheless I am someone who has learnt the language as a non-native.

And of course I would "instinctively" do this in my mother tongue - but the point is, I've made a choice not to. It has nothing to do with my child going to Oxford (most Oxford dons would find it irrelevant in my experience) or taking IQ tests (which I hope she never takes in her life without good reason.) It is about attempting to pass on a love and skill that I have worked hard for and that I believe she can have for free if I give it to her now.

I'm not asking anyone else to like it, but is it really so hard to understand to those who choose not to do this? I personally find the whole concept of "little Johnny heading off to learn French on a Saturday and then sharing his new songs with you" extremely pretentious personally (on a Saturday, for goodness's sake - give the child peace!) but I can step outside myself long enough to see why parents might do this, even if I wouldn't countenance it for my own child.

In that case MrsBean, I completely agree with you! I agree, in order for a child to become bilingual from toddlerhood onwards, he/she has to be exposed to real, authentic language within real contexts. In fact, this is the best way for an adult to learn a language too imo. It is how we learn what real, authentic discourse sounds/looks like.

I'm definitely not into the idea of hothousing children either, I think they should be pottering around in the garden instead. Sounds like such awful pressure on them. your job sounds fascinating btw! ( I would like to type a capital y but my keyboard won't let me - grrr!)

My mother is a non-native speaker of English, having perfected her school then army-taught English when she moved to the UK and married. No-one has ever spotted that she is not actually a native speaker.

I am a native English speaker and regret that I was not brougt up bilingually, but the accepted wisdom at the time was that a child would never be confident and fluent in two languages. The insular English, totally ignoring the experience of the majority of the world's population.

My DH is French and we are bringing up DD bilingually, both speaking French to her in the hope of slightly balancing the overwhelming tide of English around us. My French is good (certainly post A level) but not perfect. However, better than no French, I feel.

(Not, sadly, a view shared by a passer-by who, having first stopped us in the park to practice her French, switched, when I told her that I am not actually French, to a long lecture about how I am condemming DD to a life as a 'defective bilingual speaker'. Funny how people feel that it is their business, including the initiator of this thread)

We are also exposing DD to as much Spanish and German as we can, with songs, books and DVDs, since we both speak those languages. We hope that she will grow up bilingual in English and French and able to get by in German and Spanish, but even more importantly, be open minded, curious and enthusiastic about other languages.

Language is not a performance art; it is not an opera recital, it is a tool. Even if it is not a perfect tool, it will do a very respectable job.

I spent many years in Germany and would say I'm pretty much fluent, with my husband being just slightly less so, in German. However, I rarely speak German to her. I will read her the occasional book that we have in German to her, and tell her words here and there when we are over for a visit. But I would never speak German to her with the aim of her learning it, it's way too artificial a set-up to be effective.

Anyways, it's very handy being able to talk to DH in German without the little ones understanding. Saves me having to spell everything out!!