Advice on managing bilingualism from birth

[FjordMor]

I'm British, pregnant with my first & living in Norway with my Norwegian partner. My Norwegian isn't up to much at all yet so we've decided we want to bring the baby up fully bilingual as it would be weird for me & my family at home not to be able to speak to him/her in English and feel it's vital for him/her to have a native understanding of English.

At the moment, the plan is not to do one parent/one language although we will to some extent when making a concerted effort - with reading bedtime stories etc. My partner has 2 girls who will be 11 & 13 when the baby arrives who will only speak Norwegian to their sibling and live with us 30% of the time. Also he/she will spend a lot of time with his/her Norwegian extended family. Partner & I speak solely English at home when the girls aren't with us and he is completely fluent.

We figured as our child will be living in Norway and what with family and neighbour children & tv, mostly exposed to Norwegian, that I would speak solely English to him/her except when in family situations and that we would send him/her to an English (International) playgroup, pre-school and school where he/she would also get proper tuition in Norwegian language but the bulk of the teaching is in English.

Can anyone comment from experience as to whether this is a balance that might work to achieve true bilingualism?

I live in France and my husband is French - all three of my children are bilingual. You should speak English and your husband Norwegian - any mix and they will inherit accents and grammatical errors. Once this is established there should be no problems. My kids went to an entirely French primary with English on Wednesday mornings (no school in France on Wednesday) and now they are in college they are in a bilingual school. I have had no problems at all. By the way all the Norwegians I know seem to speak brilliant English so I wouldn't worry too much. Good luck.

By the way if you can get BBC TV on satellite this will help enormously.

Ooh thanks for your prompt reply hattymattie. You're right about Norwegians speaking great english. They are good with me mostly but conversations at family gatherings are all in Norwegian. A lot of them are fluent but don't like speaking English. As for my partner, he speaks english with no discernable accent at all. When he was introduced to people I knew in the UK, most could not believe he wasn't British. His english is immaculate and perfect and his accent British. I just worry that it will seem weird if we're both talking with the child, I say something in english, partner says something in norwegian (to the child) then turns to me and speaks english as he will have to speak english to me. Partner will speak english to me all the time in front of the child. That's the only way we can do it. Does that matter do you think?

All the people that will speak to the child will speak to him/her in norwegian, apart from me. That is why I favoured the English language schooling as I'd be crushed and find life very difficult if the child refused to speak english. I'm encouraged to hear you experienced no problems; I've heard so many horror stories of the child refusing to speak one of the languages when the balance hasn't been achieved or for seemingly no particular reason at all. It's tricky stuff! :)

We do have a VPN so getting the BBC channels won't be a problem :).

I'm a little bit in the same situation here. I have lived in the UK for 10 years now but I grew up in Spain and always went to a Spanish school up until University. I'm British and I always spoke English at home with my parents and my brother so was lucky to grow up fully bilingual. My husband is British and we speak English at home. My DD is 2 months old and I am speaking to her in Spanish. I am the only one to do so, so she will only hear it from me.

In my experience, when I was growing up in Spain, I had several friends who had one foreign parent and one Spanish parent. My friends grew up knowing little of the foreign language as they refused to answer back in the foreign language. I believe that in that situation young kids don't want to be different to their peers, neither do they understand why they should reply in this other 'strange' foreign language when their parents themselves speak to each other in the other language/the language everyone else speaks/the language they speak at school.

I'm going to persevere with the Spanish and get lots of books and DVDs. I'll also tell DD that it's our 'special language' to encourage her to speak back to me in Spanish. I must admit it's all a bit daunting! I think being realistic I will be happy if she understands Spanish even if she doesn't speak it fluently. At least she will them be able to understand my extended family in Spain and pick it up as she gets older.

I do know of one very positive case in the UK though, with a Spanish mother who speaks to the kids in Spanish, a Turkish father who speaks to them in Turkish and kids who are in British mainstream school. They speak all 3 languages fluently - although I gather the parents had to be quite strict with them to get them to reply back in each language.

Good luck!

Sounds fine to me.

We have achieved what I feel is very decent success with bilingualism. I am Swedish, dh English, we live in the UK but visit Sweden in the holidays. We have not been 100% strict with OPOL; when around other people each of us will use whatever language is appropriate to include everybody, and I have allowed myself to use English from time to time (e.g. when helping them with homework).

Both dcs speak native quality Swedish, dd also reads it avidly, has had several pen friends and is always texting her Swedish cousins (ds isn't very keen on reading or writing anything , but he can at least read the sports section of a Swedish paper).

I have no particular horror stories to relate, though that may be because I am so laidback that I don't worry more about temporary refusal to speak one language or another than about refusal to tidy their room, or eat their greens, or any of the other refusals that are part of family life. I don't take it personally, I just keep serving up the same sprouts, and I think that helps.

Ds did go through a period of refusing to speak English for about 6 months which was awkward as we lived in the UK and his poor friends at nursery couldn't work out what had got into him- but he got over that, and it was probably just a convenient way of covering up his shyness anyway.

sounds like a good plan. There is no such thing as true bilingualism, we all end up feeling more confortable in one or the other language depending on context and that's normal and fine. We never speak two languages the exact same. Look at me - I'm more comfortable writing in English which is not my first language, just by doing most my writing in English. I also would struggle in a work context in German, having spent most of my working life in the UK. However, I still feel more comfortable speaking to friends in German as I feel I can express my feelings better in German.

As to children:
I found that if only one parent speaks the minority language (in our case we're in the Uk, DH speaks English, I speak English to DH, I speak German only to children) this leads to threatened bilingualism, or passive bilingualism. There needs to be some "extra", esp. if children attend daycare (in English in our case).

So, I took my oldest onto a holiday without DH to Germany, when she was 4, 2 times 2 weeks each, once with 2 German kids. Before, she only spoke individual German words but understood German perfectly. Now she speaks German fluently, though she has better vocab in English (that's fine though, she lives in the UK after all).

International playgroup may work, but I found that most kids speak English in our German playgroup. If you have friends that speak English only, or who pretend they really don't understand Norwegian, that may help.

Also be happy about any degree of bilingualism, it'll grow and they can always use it later even if they don't speak it now.

Good luck!

What you suggests will definitely work. My parents are from Hong Kong and I grow up in NZ. There are many chinese families who speak chinese only at home, and the children are native level in English with a complete kiwi accent. There will be enough exposure just from friends, school and tv. Admittedly there will be more English exposure in Norway, than Chinese in NZ.

And my experience is EsmeMrsP seen in Spain. It's more likely your kids will refuse to speak English as it's not the community language and they don't want to be different. But as pointed out upthread, Norwegian speaks very very fluent English, so at least they should always be able to communicate with your family.

If Norway is anything like Sweden I imagine English is the one language they will not be refusing to speak for street cred reasons: it will probably do them a big favour in the coolness stakes.

I have distant relations who were brought up trilingual - different rooms in the house downstairs 'were' different languages - so a question could be in one language and answered in a different one depending which room the two were in - and conversations could flow through all three.

My nieces are bilingual and their father speaks to them in English and mother German (with the odd bit of Greek and Sweedish )

Really interesting stories - this is exactly what I hoped for - to hear from other's experiences.

cory - out of interest, does your DH speak Swedish or do you speak english to him?

Dh speaks Swedish though ungrammmatically and with a poor accent; he mainly uses it when we are with my family. But it means the children and I can speak Swedish freely, and he will sometimes answer in Swedish. I mainly speak English to him though.

I think you will be all set . Ds is 5 and speaks perfect English. Well maybe not perfect,there is something kind of different about his accent that you can't quite put your finger on, and he literally translates some things.. Has a terrible habit of saying 'like this we can go...' instead of 'that way we can go to the park later' which no amount of trying manages to fix . Dh speaks Catalan at home, we speak spanish to each other, I speak English to the kids. But I do talk a lot we also have sky so all tv they watch is in English and I am the main story reader so 95% of their books are in English. So far no signs of language refusal - what age does this become common? Hopefully we might bodyswerve this issue currently his best friend at school is also English and I have a lot of English friends who we see often, also he is very close to my parents which itself is a motivator.

Dh's parents spoke Norwegian at home, but he spoke Norwegian with his friends (norwegian school). He is totally bilingual.

Your system sounds fine. Our two DC are trilingual at age 3 and 7, although their vocabularies in each language sometimes cross over and they don't speak totally grammatically in either. Perfection will come later

My best advice is to persevere. You will be tempted to emphasise one of the languages when your baby still isn't saying anything over the age of 1.5, for example, but hang in there, she will speak soon enough, and in both languages.

Oh, very excited to find this thread! Lots of great advice? :o

My partner and I are in a similar position. I'm British, he?s Norwegian (living in the UK). My Norwegian is useless so our household language is English. DP will speak exclusively Norwegian to the bab, and me English. Hopefully using Norwegian books/audio tapes/ skyping relatives/ holidays, will be enough to foster bilingualism. (Hopefully my Norwegian will develop alongside the bab...)

I think the main issue for us will be perseverance. It must be so easy to let the secondary language slip (though I guess for you this won?t be a problem as your household language is already the ?foreign? one). We also live in London so we can join a free weekly Norwegian baby/toddler playgroup. Our due date is October ? are I right in thinking yours is too?

One other thing, I read a study which looked at how babies are initially less confused by two languages if they?ve been exposed to them both in the womb. So DP has already started talking/singing Norwegian into my tummy! Might be a load of tripe, but it?s quite fun! :o

I can only speak from the experience of my clients (oh and a family at school).

They have found that having one parent one language works really well. It means that when their children speak, you wouldn't know that they weren't 'native'. One of the dads went to parents evening (the family are French). The teacher told him he must be in the wrong class because she didn't have any French children in her class. He said (in a beautifully heavy French accent) 'my son does not sound like me because I only speak French to him. If I spoke English to him, he would sound like this'.

I remain jealous that I didn't have another language to pass on to my children.

Great to see some new posts on this thread again! It had been bumped of my 'Threads I'm on' so I didn't realise until now.

ohdarcy - good to hear your experiences. It's always good to hear how things have worked for others. A little accent wouldn't bother me as long as I can make myself clearly understood to my LO and vice versa :).

destrier - did you mean english at home and Norwegian with the friends/school? I'm very interested to hear your DH's experience of that as it sounds like a very similar situation.

Marslady - always good to hear when OPOL works - it has so many advocates and will definitely form the basis of what we'll do.

violetlights - wow! So many parallels! I'm glad you have a Norwegian kindergarten/playgroup in London to go to. I imagine it could be quite hard in the UK as English is so ubiquitous but agree that persevering with compensating with as much Norwegian exposure as you can would probably be the key. I don't know what part of town you're in but did you know there's a Norwegian School in Wimbledon? I didn't before I came here to Norway and saw it in the paper and it's only about 2 miles from where I was living!! :) As an aside, how do you find learning Norwegian? I don't find it that hard to learn, grammatically but the pronunciation kills me. Is that a universal British thing do you reckon? DP never understands when I try to say stuff to him (although strangely my stepkids get it...)!

Whereabouts is your dh from? The language is relatively easy - the dialects are really hard (I learnt to speak when we met).

Yes - dh spoke English at home all of the time, but went to a norwegian school and hisfriends/ peers were all Norwegian. I'll try to post again when I getmore time.

Ds is bilingual - dh only speaks Norwegian (and is really consistant - other friends in our situation who are not have struggled with the minority language).

Hi Destrier. Dp is from the Stavanger area & that's where we live now. He, his family & my step kids speak the local dialect. I find it easier to listen to & pronounce than proper bokmål strangely enough & when I do speak I tend to use mish mash of bokmål & 'Stavangersk'. Where is your dh from?

Interesting to hear about the consistency. English will be the minority language for ours and I will be consistent as my Norwegian isn't up to using on the child! Her sisters & father will use the local dialect with her & DP & me communicate to each other solely in English. My MIL may occasionally use English to the child if she's using it with me one on one. I'm hoping this may have an effect of the child thinking it's 'normal' to switch between languages depending on who you're talking to. Hopefully .

Nice to hear your expereinces FjordMor! My Norwegian's terrible - grammar and pronunciation. I'm just not a good learner language wise. I've gone through all the Pimsleur tapes, but they pretty much only teach me how to chat up women in bars (useful...) and borrowing money from strangers (even more useful). Plus, dp's from Bergen which sounds completely different to all the language tapes I listen to. I'm just hoping I can pick up bits with the baby! I'm pretty sure all British people find it difficult to wrap their vocal cords around those Nordic sounds... after 17 years DP still says I don't pronounce his name right!

From Bergen - Hooray for the West coast! I find the Bergen accent much easier to understand the eastern accents.

TBH if she goes to a Norwegian school, and there is so much language at home (you and you and your dh), I think she will be fine. Don't forget that TV over there is often subtitled, rather than dubbed (although not for the youngest of children) so they do get to hear a lot of English as well. Did you know you can get English TV channels through a satellite...

Yay west coast indeed! I agree that the accent is much easier to understand. The 'eg', 'meg' & 'ikkje' is also much easier for me than the 'yai' & 'mai' & 'ikke'. We currently get an array of BBC channels & watch online via a VPN. Will make use of BBC children's programming I'm sure! At the moment we'll probably start her in an English speaking barnehage (because she'll spend a LOT of time with her Norwegian family) & review the situation after a couple of years re 'big school' depending on how the languages are balancing out (& our finances!).

I'm heartened by your experience though that consistent OPOL is working for you. I hear a lot of anecdotes of kids refusing to respond in the minority language so I guess that's got me erring on the side of caution!

Ds didn't answer back in Norwegian until about 3, but dh persisted - he refuses to speak English to him, now you'd never know this. In the future, if he begins to refuse Norwegian, we have decided that dh will never speak English to him (apart from where manners dictate - English friends etc.). Because he is so consistent, it feels wierd for ds to speak to dh in English - he doesn't like it, just as he hates me speaking Norwegian. Even if ds spoke English, dh would speak norsk, that way he would have full understanding.

Persevere with the Norwegian - I am hopeless as languages, but am pretty fluent now (accent aside).

FjordMor and Destrier, I love to hear your experiences! I must say on joining MN this week I hardly hardly imagined I'd find advice on raising a norsk/english speaking baby!! Hurray for the interweb as my father would say!! :o

I'll definitely persevere with the language... god natt!

I'm a few days late to this discussion, but thank you! Very interesting read.
I'm Norwegian, DH is English, we live in the UK. First baby due in October, so lots of parallels with FjordMor and Violetlights! :)
I'm planning on speaking only Norwegian to the baby, DH doesn't speak much at all (he might learn a little I suppose) so will still have to speak English to a certain extent at home when I'm talking to him. Hoping that will be ok.

The TV idea is not bad (still a few years into the future though) -maybe I'll see if it is possible to get NRK by satellite. And taking the baby on holiday just us to Norway to speak to family is definitely something to do. Some great advice on this thread.

Lykke til! :)