Tri-lingual upbringing - toddler introducing a 4th language of own devising?

[MrFibble]

In other words he is now talking gibberish occasionally.

DS is 2.75 and is happy in his mother tongue, happy in his "father" tongue (we do OPOL) and happy in the community language which he is exposed to 3 mornings a week at creche and when we are out and about around the village.

However, a few weeks ago he started spouting off in his very own language and I am a little baffled by this. He is still speaking the other 3 but his own "DS-ese" language is cropping up more and more and bears very little similarity to any of the others. I can make head nor tail of it and neither can DH or anyone else.

Does anyone have experience of this? Is this just normal toddler-ese? Best plan to ignore or could it be a sign of something else? I'm not particularly worried, just looking for some reassurance I suppose as his sister (who had the same language exposure) didn't do it at all!

Apparently I did this at the same age (also tri-lingual up to that point).

Back then (60s) the general belief was that being bilingual held you back both speaking and later learning to read. Our GP had what must have been quite a difficult conversation with my mother where he suggested I was not quite as clever as my mother thought I was, and that maybe 3 languages was too much.

She was persuaded to drop her native language and only speak to me in English. I have to say I have always regretted this. It was a barrier to my relationship with my grandmother and extended family and I have never quite managed to be fluent (although I understand it fairly well). I feel I have missed so much.

I also feel sad for my mother. I cannot imagine not speaking to my children in my own language, to not use the words which are most natural to me to soothe, caress or chastise them.

My younger brother was not brought up bilingual or trilingual at all. He developed his own language which was gibberish,although I remember that I could understand it and had to translate for him to the rest of the family. It lasted years, but I think it was an imaginative game to him. I also think that he had a measure of speech impediment, which, looking back, was probably due to learning English from a non-native speaker, so he learnt it with an accent. He speaks just fine now.

Just carry on speaking to your son, and I would carry on speaking in your own language.

Thanks for the reassurance. So sorry to hear the advice your mother had. I too can't imagine not speaking myother tongue to the dcs and neither can dh. I just wish I'd been brought up bilingual - saves so much effort later on ;)

Just to add another perspective - my DS is resolutely monolingual and does/did this at age 3 and 4.

He had lots of made up words and enjoyed saying nonsense sentences and rhymes and so did several of his friends - though by no means all. He usually did it as a game and would find it funny - he'd generally swap back to English at moments of stress when he really wanted to make himself understood.

So I would say it's completely normal and just part of them discovering the rules of language and experimenting with them - DS1's language was mainly nonsense but conformed to some English lexical rules with "ing" and "ed" endings.

Something I've just thought of actually - DS has several friends who don't have English as their first language and several who at that time bare spoke English at all (including his cousin). So this may have fed into his game?

This is well documented in twins, of them developing their own 'secret' language for communication between themselves.

There are some really interesting studies out there about language development and how language evolve, our brains have an innate ability to see patterns and create order.

That's interesting. Do you have a link?

My twins had their own language initially, but I didn't mention it, because I did feel that was a twin thing.

Long time since I read either of them, but I remember enjoying The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Oliver Sacks also wrote a book about sign language called Seeing Voices.

I remember that one of them (Sacks I think) wrote about a community of sign language speakers (even though many members were not deaf) where the babies had some signs at 6 months old. He speculated that this early development of language was because it is harder to learn to manipulate the tiny muscles in your voice box than the bigger muscles which control hands and fingers, but that babies probably understood language much earlier than previously thought, which I thought was fascinating.

Thanks interesting Jaybird. Strangely enough DD claims she understands DS perfectly. Not sure I entirely believe her... I'll see if I can get hold of the Language Instinct.

I'd be really interested if anyone has any links to invented languages and "twin-ese".

There is a link here

www.twin-pregnancy-and-beyond.com/twin-language.html

And similar

multiples.about.com/od/twintoddlers/a/twintalk.htm

One of the things about twins is that they tend to be each other's primary attachment object (usually the mother or primary care giver).

So, for example, when they reached 6 months old if I picked one of my boys up because he was crying, his brother would cry until he was put down, not because he was jealous (he would not want to be picked up himself), but because they had separation anxiety from each other.

They had separation anxiety from me at about a year, the age when most babies get separation anxiety from their secondary attachment object (usually their father).

A short synopsis on an interesting experiment can be found here: www.ling.ed.ac.uk/lec/LEC/Evolution_Experiment.html

Thanks for the links - very interesting.

DS has now dropped the gibberish so it appears it was just a phase. Interestingly he is now also completely separating all three languages.

What I find particularly interesting is that the DCs speak English together, even when with DH who speaks German to them. They both speak German to him but if they are addressing each other they switch to English. DH is a bit worried by this but since English is very much the minority language I'm not! I am sure it will switch when they are both in the same school.

DD does the same. She is 4, bilingual with much stronger minority than majority language, speaks a few phrases of a second minority language with her grandmother and quite a lot of 'giberish'. I think it might be getting less, but I am certainly not at all worried about it. From her point of view, why not make up your own words? Objects already have at least 3 different names.