OPOL - How do you speak to your partner?

[LettucesAndRoses]

Hi there,

We're raising our DD (15 months) bilingual, we both speak our mother tongues to her.

My question is what do you speak when you address your partner during family meals for example?
We stick to our mother tongues in the presence of our DD but I wonder how that's going to work when she's older and we're having a conversation all together. Will she have to keep switching back and forth? Won't she think we both understand eachother's language and so there's no need to bother speaking both?

Would love to hear about your experiences :-)

We speak the language between us we always have so one of us is constantly switching at the table depending on who they are talking too. It’s been quite easy. We understand all of each other’s languages that the kids speak (3) which makes things easier. The kids go through phases but there’s no confusion.

DH and I have always spoken his language together (the language of the country we live) and we do the same in front of our DC. I just switch to English when talking directly to the DC.

I should add that my DC are still very young so I have no idea how it'll work when they're older (i.e. which language we'll speak when having a family discussion)!

I separated, makes things easier haha
I speak russian to kids, ex speaks arabic to them. When we lived together, I spoke a mix of arabic and french to their dad.
My 12 y.o. son and I started a parenting podcast on spotify, an one of the episodes is about multilingual families.
Well, episode 2. We are still very new to this.

Have a listen if you want. This will encourage us a lot and maybe answer your questions.

open.spotify.com/show/6Qjwn90kYG7UQGxq7WC9eR?si=jxVPwBUsQbS-IDGW1gEwVw&utm_source=copy-link

English. DH is Dutch but speaks fluent English. Italian is my second language. I’ve only ever spoken to my baby(15months) in Italian and her father in Dutch but she hears us speak English everyday with each other a

She recently started saying words in Dutch but mostly expresses herself in Italian.
Never in English tho at least not yet

ExH and I are separated now, so I speak a mixture of my parents’ language and English, and ExH does the same at his house with his native language.
When we all lived together, I would speak my language to them, ExH would speak his, but we would all speak English together during meal times etc, mainly because I don’t speak DH’s native language fluently and vice versa.

@Jujules20 my middle child did that for a long time. He obviously understood all 3 languages because he’d follow instructions given in each one…but he refused to speak English until he started nursery at 3 Got to the point where ExH or I would ask him a question in English and he’d reply in the native language of whichever parent asked the question!

She'll switch back and forth and as time goes on you'll find so will you.
We are an Italian-English speaking family- DD is now 18 and bilingual. We use some words in Italian in the middle of an English sentence because it seems right, and vice versa.
I'd say don't worry about it too much. OPOL rarely means absolutely sticking to one or the other.

@PotatoGoblins clever child you’ve got 😀

To be fair mine hears me speak 5 languages almost everyday. I find it amazing how their little brains differentiate so clearly between languages.
I often look at her and wonder if I was that bright at her age which I doubt. She started saying ananas since Monday and I don’t know how as I never taught her that word!

@Jujules20 I’m fascinated by their little brains too!! Just how much information they can retain! I reckon if I tried to learn a third language now as an adult, he would all go horribly Pete Tong and my brain would turn to mush!

I’m French, DH is english.
I speak English (Obvioulsy), DH French is let’s say limited (or was very limited).

I spoke in French to the dcs, DH in english
We speak english to each other.

A friend of mine was speaking her language to the dcs, her DH his mother tongue and they were speaking English to each other (as neither if them knew the other language).

So basically you switch from one language to the other all the time. Works very well (and DH learnt some French in the process!)

[quote PotatoGoblins]@Jujules20 my middle child did that for a long time. He obviously understood all 3 languages because he’d follow instructions given in each one…but he refused to speak English until he started nursery at 3 Got to the point where ExH or I would ask him a question in English and he’d reply in the native language of whichever parent asked the question![/quote]
My dcs still do that and they are older teens!!

I think that it’s an automatic reaction. I speak to mummy therefore it’s in French. There is no thinking iyswim.

Fwiw I used the OPOL mainly because it has been a way for me to ensure that the dcs have had as much contact with (my) minority language as possible.
We didn’t have the opportunity to go back to France often. No cousins around etc… so it was essential for me that they would always speak in French with me.

If you have more opportunities to speak your language in other context/other people etc… then I don’t think it’s as I portant iyswim.

I speak English to our DC and DH speaks German. His English is perfect, my German not so good so we speak English to eachother and in front of the DC. We live in Germany so they speak German all day, in school and to family.