When we both speak both languages - what do we do?

[flackjillpop]

I'm bilingual - my first language is arabic but I came to the UK at 14 so i am fluent in English.
Arabic is my DH second language and English is his first. (he's 2 generation british and actually mostly speaks english with his nuclear family)
At home we will often speak arabic to each other but switch to english when DH says it is to advanced for him.

Expecting our first DC soon and wondering about how to do language.

Do we continue to speak to each other the way we do now? Speak like that to DC (so as it wouldn't be 'advanced' would be speaking Arabic) ? Or does DH speak English and I speak Arabic to DC? (So as well DH would speak english to me and I would reply in Arabic and vice versa - which we do very very occasionally)

Ideas?

Hi
I would carry on as you are. If you try to change your patterns it won't feel natural and won't work. Children are great at understanding and sorting out languages. My dh is Spanish and I am English. When DS was born we hadn't been back in the uk long and still spoke a lot of Spanish at home. Ds first words were from both languages. At 14 he still speaks Spanish well, although living in the uk, English is much better. He does go and visit family in Spain regularly and they don't speak English.

(DD on the other hand has up til now been very negative about speaking Spanish, and doesn't speak nearly so well, but in mitigation, by the time she was born, we'd been in the UK so long we used English as our home language.)

hope this helps a bit

I would carry on as you are but, when speaking directly to your child, each speak your strongest language - Arabic for you, English for your husband. This approach is known as OPOL (one person one language) and, while it is by no means the only way to do it, it works for lots of people and keeps things simple.

Good luck whatever you decide!