Bilingual toddler but no words!

[BreadZeppelin]

13 month old being brought up in a OPOL household. I'm a minority language SAHP so lots of minority language at home and community language with the baby's dad, family, at nursery etc

The baby recognises a lot of words and can follow simple commands, but aside from knowing the dog's name she doesn't speak at all yet. Non-stop babbling but nothing really recognisable!

Would love to hear the experiences of other bilingual families - is this normal progress? Or should be getting worried? Thanks

Totally normal, mine was the same. I think she only said 2 vaguely discernible things at that age and one was the name of our cat! Then she went to nursery at 15mo in her Dad's language and kept on with babble while she attuned to it. She started with sentences at around 2, but no English (minority language) again until 3. She could understand everything I asked her to do though so I wasn't worried. You just need to be patient!

Also, every child, bilingual or not, is different and each has their own way of expressing themselves. My friend's DS spoke earlier but mixed up both languages in sentences until he was about 5, whereas DD was late speaking the minority language but her always kept both languages distinct.

My kid is bilingual and starting a 3rd language now at crèche. She only says 3 intelligible words in one of her languages but she understands alot.

ETA she's 15 months

My children varied in their ability to talk. The oldest was 2.5 before he spoke. One was 7-8 months and babbling sentences by 18 months but at 7 he still makes lots of grammatical mistakes in both languages. Like "I go-ed to the playground". The one who took a long time to speak, rarely made mistakes.

She may be saying words that just aren't clear enough to identify yet. Or she may just be too young! Many toddlers don't have any clear words at 13 months. Babbling and a good receptive vocabulary suggest that it won't be long before she starts talking.

My experience is that language development in young bilingual kids isn't really that different to monolinguals, except that they may have some "situational" language gaps due to the fact that their languages are each used in different circumstances.

By the way, with DD we found that the babbling was distinctly "accented" - she did English babble first (maternal, minority language) then French babble after she started nursery at 12 months (community language). She was a very babbly baby and an extremely talkative toddler (in both languages). Her brother never babbled in either language, and although he talked quite early he has never been as talkative and his language development was overall much less precocious.

While I've no personal experience, at one point I worked in an organisation where the majority of the children of those working for it would have been in a bi or tri lingual situation. We were specifically told that speech was often delayed, but longer term children would speak both languages fluently. Given that this has been shown to ward of dementia, it can only be good!

Lots of received wisdom about bilingualism kicking around. I am not aware of any evidence that it delays speech though it may give the impression of slow vocabulary development (because monolingual adults will only ever be exposed to part of the child's vocab).

My experience is that carers or teachers blaming bilingualism for a child's speech issues often results in an unnecessary delay in diagnosis of a real (ie not related to bilingualism) speech-language problem.

Not that this is relevant here since a 13 month old who is babbling and who responds appropriately to speech is developing perfectly normally - whether mono- or bilingual!

Thanks so much for your messages!

Mistigri, that's what occurred to me! I'm nowhere near the panicking stage yet but I didn't want to keep brushing it off if there really was a problem!

Her babble is a real mix of English and community language sounds and she'll often come out with something that sounds just like a word but is completely out of context

We'll just have to keep waiting and listening!