How to raise child with multilingual parents living abroad

[Alacritas]

Hello everyone,

My wife and I have a 4-month old boy, and while we have a plan for how to raise him multilingually, I am a little bit concerned about it, because it is not exactly OPOL or any of the other methods I have found.

My wife is Bulgarian; her English is fluent, but not native level. I'm American and in addition to English, my mother tongue, I speak Bulgarian at a near-native level.

We live in Bali, where there are two predominant languages: Balinese and Indonesian. Neither of us speaks Balinese, but I have conversational Indonesian. I'm learning Balinese, but it's not a major focus for me. My wife has little interest in learning either language beyond a basic level.

Ideally, our son will learn all 4 of these languages; however, that seems somewhat ambitious.

The following is our current setup.

When alone with the baby:

• I speak English
• My wife speaks Bulgarian
• The nanny speaks Indonesian

When my wife and I are together with the baby:

• We speak Bulgarian

When other people are around:

• My wife speaks English
• I speak whatever language they speak (English if they're expats, Indonesian if they're locals); unless my wife is around, in which case I speak English.

My initial idea with this is that he will associate Bulgarian with us and the home, Indonesian with the local community, and English as the fallback language. This is reinforced by my speaking whatever language everyone else is speaking (as I am used to), which is the behavioral model that I would like him to adopt as well.

There is a potential additional complication in that I speak several other languages on a regular basis (mostly French and Swedish), but these are usually confined to certain contexts that he will not be exposed to very much.

Once he is a bit older, I want to introduce him to through more varied language exposure via text, video, and audio.

All this to say, I am somewhat concerned about whether or not this is a stable structure that will allow him to flourish with all of the languages. Especially now that I have written it down, it sounds quite complicated. Granted, it's more low key than the polyglot childrearing daydreams of my university years, where I planned on speaking to my future children in Latin and French in addition to whatever local language there would be...but now that I'm older, I decided to try for a simpler approach 😝

What do you think -- is this likely to work? What could we do to support or modify this structure to encourage his healthy mental and social development?

Thank you in advance!

You are overthinking this. One parent should speak to him in English and the other in Bulgarian. He will then be fluent in both. If the nanny speaks to him in Indo he will pick that up too. Bear in mind as well that kids take on a huge amount culturally and linguistically from formal school education. You also need a plan about where the centre of his world will be when he grows up in terms of education and job opportunities - its never too early to start thinking about that.

We are raising our child with 4 languages but we have never researched much in to the different methods and the science behind it. From the beginning we have just done what comes naturally and for us that means each parent speaking their mother tongue when alone with the child and all speaking English together. We always knew that we would enrol in a local school so learning the local language was never going to be an issue.

Our child is now 5 and obviously prefers English although he has a very good level in all of the languages we speak at home. He lags behind in the local language but he has only been in school for a year and I am not worried about him catching up over time.

Over the summer we take an Au Pair from my home country as we consider my language the one that is most complicated and lacking in exposure and we see the benefit of having the additional contact with a native speaker for a couple of months.

We are also lucky to live in a big city with lots of immigrants so we have no problem finding play groups, storytime, music classes etc in our native languages.

You’re definitely overthinking this! Just get on with it and enjoy being a parent. 😜

@TheResident @Soontobe60 I probably am overthinking this, good point! And for sure I am enjoying being a parent, that's a given 😆

My concern with having me always speak English and my wife always speak Bulgarian is that we mostly speak Bulgarian to each other, and having lived in Bulgaria for most of my adult life and gotten quite assimilated into the culture, it feels incredibly natural for me to speak Bulgarian when with my wife and the baby. Both of us find it more confusing to have each of us speaking a different language when together. That's why we thought of this structure where it's based on social context instead of just the basic OPOL method.

@Maine234 This makes sense and sounds somewhat similar to our setup. Thanks for sharing your experience! ❤️