Bilingual toddler (hoping!) starting to talk - advice needed pls

[gutzgutz]

DH and I are trying to bring up our PFB bilingual (he is 20 months). DH is from another country and I am English. We both speak each language exclusively to PFB and mainly English (fluently) to one another. We live in the UK.

PFB has recently started to talk and has obviously picked up words in both languages. My query: if he says the word in DH's language for, say, water do I repeat it back to him "yes, correct, that's xxx" or should I say "yes, correct, that's water" i.e do I reaffirm my language from me or DH's language for that particular item?

Hope that makes sense. Any advice grateful received.

The objective is that your son speaks the appropriate language to the appropriate person (parent, teacher, grandparent etc)

So, if your son says ''mummy, aqua", you can reformulate: yes, darling, do you want water? I will pour your a glass of water.

You can repeat water a bit more than natural to emphasise it, IYSWIM.

If he says, 'mummy, can I have some aqua"
The same applies.

The bigger problem is what to do if one language has much more exposure.

thanks. I've been doing a bit of both which is probably the worst thing to do! anyone else had experience?

I would say: "Yes, you are right, that's water. And daddy calls it aqua".
That way you are reinforcing and giving positive feedback on the word "aqua" that he has managed to learn, and at the same time you are letting him know what the equivalent word for aqua is in your language.

That worked well for us. In our case we chose to speak the minority language at home to increase exposure as DH is fluent in my language, and we live in London. But I didn't want DS to be confused on the rare occasion that he said an English word he had picked up at nursery.

At first I used to say mummy says "agua", daddy says "water", but I felt that explanation didn't fit exactly as DH mostly spoke in Spanish to him. So from very early on I started to explain him that there were two languages and said "in Spanish you say xxx, in English/at nursery they call it xxx".

Hope this helps you.

I think a bit of both sounds fine. I would slightly rephrase Greyback's objective and say there are several objectives involved:

that he speaks the appropriate language to the appropriate person

that he learns as many words as possible

that he learns to feel good about his language development in either language

I did what Elle did and talked to dcs about languages, naming them by name, at an early stage. "mummy says" wouldn't have worked for us either as I was the one who took them to playgroup/trips out etc and naturally had to speak English to interact with their friends.

Greythorne, sorry- I've turned you into a werewolf, haven't I? And it's absolutely years since I've read HP. I do apologise