Bilingual parents

[mabel12345]

Hi ! I was wondering if any of you have any book recommendations for bilingual parents. I am polish and my partner’s english, I’m currently 18 weeks pregnant with our first baby and I’ve started to think how am I going to work that out. I want my baby to be able to S peak both languages but living in UK English will obviously take lead. Any advice welcome! 🤗
Thanks x

[holidayoncorona]

The most recommended system is the one parent one language rule

www.raising-bilingual-children.com/basics/info/rules/

[corythatwas]

Whether you decide to go all-out one-parent-one-language or not, the essential thing is to ensure that your child hears a lot of the minority language. They need plenty of exposure, it needs to be fun (at least some of the time), and they need to be put in situations where they have to use the language. Story-telling and singing to them are excellent ways of reinforcing: songs are particularly good because they stay with you. Also, try not to stress about it- sometimes children mix languages- that's fine, sometimes they make mistakes- that's fine, sometimes they decide they're only going to speak one language and not the other- again, try to be relaxed about it. Persevere, use the language anyway, stay positive.

[mabel12345]

Thanks for great advice!

[YRGAM]

@corythatwas gives excellent advice. One parent one language as a strict rule is being rejected more and more by linguists. The important thing is a lot of good-quality input from a range of sources - from you, from your relatives, from TV and books, from music.

The emotional side is so important for learning languages - if you make it a chore to speak your language, or even worse if you don't respond to your child if they use English, they may form negative associations with your language and not use it in later life. Don't stress if it doesn't come straight away - the key is input, input, input. Best of luck

[grassisjeweled]

You speak exclusively Polish, your partner speaks English. Simples.

[corythatwas]

I was very interested to see you say that about research @YGRAM. My children are grown up now (and fully bilingual) but back in the day I once got kicked off a bilingual parenting forum for saying that perhaps there could be more than one way to achieve your goal.

A lot of that stuff was clearly anecdotal: one family had tried OPOL and it worked for them, so that became "OPOL is the only way to achieve bilingualism". A bit like if your child had done Kumon and got top grades in maths and your conclusion was "Kumon is the only way to get top grades".

Did a quick internet trawl now and found Annick DeHouwer's 2007 study which builds on a sample of 1899 families (sounds reassuringly large). Her findings seem more open: there is no guarantee that OPOL will lead to results, but equally it is perfectly possible to get results other ways.

This is my own experience: I have 2 children, born respectively in 1996 and 2000. I am the minority language speaker, my dh the majority language speaker. There were no language clubs or even other children speaking my language locally, but we were able to go to my country twice a year for our holidays. I speak the majority language (English) very fluently, dh speaks my language haltingly and with grammatical errors but is quite capable of communicating and reads it without effort.

There were reasons why I knew strict OPOL wouldn't work for us. One was the social situation: I did host a lot of toddler groups and other things where I needed to interact with dc and a monolingual majority-speaking child at the same time, so no way of tricking dc into believing I couldn't do this.

I also knew that I had a wealth of majority-language nursery rhymes, songs, stories, which dh didn't have in his own language. When they started school I was better placed to help them with their homework. Dd soon developed an interest in drama and that was something I could help her with and dh couldn't (couldn't scan an iambic pentameter to save his life). So I didn't want them to miss out on things I knew I could contribute. At the same time, I very much wanted them to have that in my language too. So I just put the hours in! And spent money on books, DVDs etc etc. And spoke my language a lot.

Those holidays also made it possible to create a temporarily monolingual situation in my language. There were always young cousins around who hadn't started learning languages at school and my parents always spoke our language to our dc- and even to dh.

Other than that, we were very lax about who was to speak what when. We had a vague general rule that grown-ups don't mix languages in the same sentence, but that was about it. We often had conversations that started in one language, switched to another, and then went back again. What we wanted to avoid was a sense of constraint around speaking. I did sometimes keep an eye on conversations and make sure I seized an opportunity to talk in my own language about a topic that only seemed to get covered in the other language, but that was as far as it went- there were no constraints on them.

We also talked a lot about languages to dc when they were little, using the names of the actual languages rather than "mummy's language" and "daddy's language". We wanted them to feel from the start that languages are rooted in a wider societal context, It used to be their party trick when they were about 2 to be given a word in one language and asked what it was in the other. You don't have to leave them to figure everything out for themselves- some things you can tell them.

Children's literature was great as it gave a wider frame of reference than I could provide on my own. As dc grew up, they used the internet for the same purpose. Dd watches television series in her minority language, keeps in touch with friends and relatives over social media and actually has a stronger local accent than I do.

[jamesfailedmarshmallows]

There's a book called Bilingual by Choice that is good.
We did OPOL quite strictly when they were younger, now they are teens they mix the two quite a lot.
IME a lot of our friends who didn't do OPOL the child once they started school (and English became the dominant language) refused to speak the minority language and whilst they understood everything, answered back in English.

[Disfordarkchocolate]

People who I know who have done this have each person speak their native language.

[YRGAM]

Thanks @corythatwas, that's really interesting. Your setup sounds very similar to my own - my wife speaks Finnish to our one year old and I speak English, but as we both speak each other's language (her a lot better than me) we are not doing strict OPOL - the boy will realise pretty quickly that we both understand what's being said. Glad to hear it worked out for you.

On the academic side, from what I've seen the OPOL-only idea is on the way out because it's recognised that language development is a complex, emotional thing that doesn't easily boil down to a 'tactic'. Part of this is that a bilingual person isn't just two monolingual people fused together - each bilingual person will have their own special relationship with their languages, and it follows from there that there's nothing inherently bad about mixing languages. There's even a term for it, translanguaging - that covers things like code switching, using certain words from the other language, etc - and it's now generally recognised that this is a good thing for language development and it won't make much difference if a parent uses the 'wrong' languages every now and then. Sorry if this was a bit rambly, I'm writing a thesis on this topic at the moment so I'm used to churning our pages of nonsense per day on it De Houwer has made a fair few appearances so far.

[FTMJ2020]

'Raising Multilingual Children' by Festman, Poarch and Dewaele has a lot of good tips and interesting examples. It also has a few reflection tasks to help you with out what's the best idea for your family.

[mabel12345]

Thank you everyone ! Very helpful. My only worry is that my husband doesn’t speak my language so we only communicate in English. It’s hard enough to switch quickly when my mum is over not minding doing it everyday 😆

[Lilice]

@mabel12345 I'm a mum of 3 and raising my kids as bilingual. I'm French and my husband is British. I only speak French to my children, no matter what. In the house, outside, all the time, and since the day they were born. I speak English to my husband and he speaks English to our kids. This has worked and my eldest is completely bilingual. She only communicates in French with me. My son struggles a bit, he's got speech delay but that's in both languages and due to the fact that he had glue ear for the first two years of his life and couldn't hear. He still only speaks to me in French and understands everything I say. He will speak and play in French with his sisters when I'm in the room.
English is the dominant language, seeing we live in England, and I can see that their vocabulary is richer in English than in French, and that's normal. I know a lot of French mums who didn't manage to make their children bilingual and that's because they did not consistently and exclusively spoke French to them. If you start speaking English, the child will reply in English, even if you then switch to your native tongue so be very careful with that.