Consistency

[Trudyla]

Hiya,

I?m fairly new here but really like the atmosphere so thought I could wade right in with my question.

I?m expecting my first child in August. My husband is English, I?m German. We live in Germany but only speak English at home. My husband?s German is not really good and I enjoy speaking English as I used to live in the UK for quite a while.

We are wondering how to deal with raising our child bilingually. Just to clarify, I only want the child to know both languages so it can communicate with both sides of the family. I don?t think it will be especially beneficial in future and I don?t want a perfect child that can speak as many languages as possible. I just want her to be able to identify with both languages and both cultures.

Whenever I read anything about bilingual education it always mentions that parents have to be very consistent. Why is that always stressed? What would be the impact if we weren?t consistent? I was planning on speaking German to the child for the first one and a half years while my husband would speak English. After that, once the child is in nursery, I would switch back to English since my husband and I communicate in English and it feels natural, whereas German sounds and feels forced when I use it within our family. I would speak German for the first 1.5 years so that the child won?t find it difficult to get on in the German speaking nursery. Once it is confronted with German on a daily basis I would like to go back to English as our family language.

Now this isn?t really consistent, is it, since I would swap after the first years. Would this really be so bad for the child? Why would it be bad?

I would love to hear your opinions and experiences. Sorry for the long thread, I do have difficulties condensing things down. Thanks for reading all of that.

Cheers,

Trudyla

There ARE people - including on here - who are not consistent and claim their children have never suffered for it (Cory is the main one who springs to mind.) But I suppose the basic thinking behind the consistency is this.

1. at the same time as he or she is learning two languages, your child is learning language per se. It is not like an adult learner who already knows how language works. Your child's life will be easier if, for example, every time you point at a dog, you use the same word to describe it (OPOL) or if the animal is always called "dog" within the house and "Hund" outside the house (one location one language.)

2. For a bilingual child, the parent's language is part of his or her identity and part of the relationship between parent and child. For example, the only time I speak to my child in English (instead of French) is when she puts on her mother's sunglasses - then I pretend to think that she is her mother (who I address in English) and ask her where our daughter is. She finds this hilarious, partly because I never speak English to her outside this game. Similarly, all our nursery rhymes, songs, books, music is in French. If i suddenly started speaking English to her, it would be like I was suddenly a "different person" and I think that this would distress her (again, Cory may disagree.)

I think our example also shows that you can have "family languages" rather than "a family language." I always speak to my wife in English and to my daughter in French; and they speak English to each other. It works absolutely fine for us, though I think we do all make an effort to ensure our language use does not exclude anyone.

Any help?

I think that as you are living in Germany and you are German, German is likely to be the dominant language. Therefore I wouldn't worry too much about speaking English at home. In fact I think that would be a good idea to encourage English speaking. Once your child is at nursery he will be speaking German all day, if he thinks he can speak German at home then my guess is he will. My dh and I are both English, but our children were born in Paris and attend French schools. We speak English at home (obviously) and they speak French at school - wherever we are in the world (previously Berlin - where they also spoke German - now London.) They are both perfectly bilingual. In my experience where the father speaks the minority language the kids are not so fluent unless that language is reinforced at home as you suggest. I'm not an expert, but that is my observation of the children I know in that situation. What you are proposing to do sounds like an excellent idea.

Thank you very much for your answers. I find it very interesting to hear peoples experiences and opinions.

I suppose in the end we will just have to see what works for us. I'm beginning to see and fear all the decisions that will await us in parenthood and I'm not really good at making decisions.

But I would still be interested to hear what other people are doing and thinking about this matter.

T

I forgot - the other reason for fluency is that children are typically lazy. Once one language is stronger than the other - and it will be, within the first 18 months, easily - they will try to use that all the time unless there is something "forcing" them to use the other. This is probably why a lot of parents use OPOL - it is a given that daddy speaks X and only X, while mummy speaks Y and only Y.

A risk of inconsistency is therefore that the weak language just seems too much like hard work and gets forgotten.

I'm in a sort of similar situation and we've opted for just speaking english at home - dc are learning my mt from school and other outside influences (family, etc.)

Do you have family nearby? Could the gps talk to your baby in German? Given you're living in Germany, I don't think there's any chance your dc won't learn German fluently.

If you have another baby once you've switched to English, how are you going to play it?

I think you are overthinking this, and overplanning.

It is best practice for each parent to speak his/her mother tongue (first language) to his/her child, for the simple reason that the parent's linguistic ability (syntax, vocabulary etc) will be better in his/her first language and so the child's language skills will be best developed that way.

If you want your DC to grow up speaking both languages, you then need to wait and see how things pan out and how much exposure he/she is getting (and how much progress he/she is making) in each language, and tweak exposure and experience accordingly.

You really cannot write a plan of which language you and your DH will speak to your DC in until you see how your DC's language development progresses.

Since MIFLAW mentioned my name, I just thought I'd pop in and explain what our reasoning has been (insofar as there has been any reasoning) about the two (very valid points he raised:

"1) at the same time as he or she is learning two languages, your child is learning language per se. It is not like an adult learner who already knows how language works. Your child's life will be easier if, for example, every time you point at a dog, you use the same word to describe it (OPOL) or if the animal is always called "dog" within the house and "Hund" outside the house (one location one language.)"

We got round this one by talking about language at a very early stage. Dd knew before her second birthday that there was one language called English and one language called Swedish and would happily sort words into these two categories or asked what an English word was in Swedish; she didn't need for them to be called "mummy language" and "daddy language"; all she needed was to know that there were two categories and that some people used both and others didn't.

2. For a bilingual child, the parent's language is part of his or her identity and part of the relationship between parent and child. For example, the only time I speak to my child in English (instead of French) is when she puts on her mother's sunglasses - then I pretend to think that she is her mother (who I address in English) and ask her where our daughter is. She finds this hilarious, partly because I never speak English to her outside this game. Similarly, all our nursery rhymes, songs, books, music is in French. If i suddenly started speaking English to her, it would be like I was suddenly a "different person" and I think that this would distress her (again, Cory may disagree.)

This always seemed a bit odd to me: why should parents have to be tied to one identity when the whole aim of the is to bring up a child with two identities? For me, being bilingual and bicultural is as much part of my identity as it is part of my children's identity: why is it wrong for me to switch between being different persons if it's not going to be wrong for my children? And what do my bilingual children then do when they have children of their own?

Personally, I think it's a case of whatever works for you. But the crucial thing is what MIFLAW says in his second post: be aware that a child will only become fluent in a language and identify with it if they have a lot exposure. For most people oneparentonelanguage is the easiest way of achieving that.

I'll wade in with my two penny's worth:

On point 1):

I've never mentioned the fact that there is more than one language to DS1 and he never ever spoke the "wrong" language to the wrong person. In fact I doubt if many people who didn't see us together knew he speaks and reads two languages. Until recently when he starts showing off...

DS2, on the other hand, is a show-off right from the start, and tells people in nursery how to write Chinese. Even tried to convince them there is a Chinese way to write the English alphabet.

But neither of them is quite clear on which is called English and which is called Chinese, which is probably a failure on my part.

Point 2) Agree with Cory, as usual.

FWIW I agree with Cory too!

I just find what we do easier.

I half agree with cory. Point 1 makes perfect sense however you define the separation between languages. Personally for point 2 (and this is purely me as a person) I find it enormously difficult to speak to children in anything other than English. All my nursery rhymes, my fairy tales, my child-word-games, everything is tied up with English in my mind. Despite being very good with children (honest!) I struggle to interact with them in the same way in other languages.

That may change when I have my own child of course but at the moment, because of my work I suppose, children naturally equal English. I get that in the future when we're with DH's family I'm going to have to speak their language with them but I suspect it will never feel natural. Happy to be corrected at some point in the future but really for some people language and culture and passing that on are completely bound up together.

I suppose for me it's also affected by the fact that at the moment I speak the minority language, DH speaks the majority language and so do the community. If we were in the UK then I might be tempted to rethink to balance the exposure, but then I don't know what would happen if we moved back or to a third country!

MIFLAW makes a very good point about OPOL being the easiest way to maintain exposure and consistency being emphasised to help achieve that. I would worry that the development would be somehow unbalanced if we just switched according to the situation, having seen people with virtually perfect Enlgish who only use it socially/professionally and are just missing a wide range of domestic words.

Thanks everyone for your input.

I'm feeling a bit more confident with our plan now. If it's all about the languages being spoken as much as possible then I think it should work rather well. English at home and German everywhere else.

My parents live fairly close to us so will have regular contact and my mum especially knows so many songs and poems and nursery rhymes and is not afraid to use them

I'm not sure yet what will happen once we have a second child whether I will switch back or not.

I suppose I tend to overplan things anyway and will just have to see what works best for us.

My husband is much more relaxed and thinks we as a family can find out what works best for us while actually doing it. I on the other hand tend to need a plan. Must be the German in me. Nevermind

Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to answer me.

Cheers,

T