Minority Language at Home

[milamum]

Hi all,

DH and I live in England but we are both from a different country and speak our native (minority) language at home although we are both fluent in English. We have a 14 months DD who hears minority language all the time and majority (English) only from TV, while out or in playgroups which she goes to twice a week for an hour at a time.

I have a couple of concerns. First one is that she does not speak yet apart from saying mama, dada and lots of babbling and I wonder if it's because she is exposed to two languages but English is not through active engagement (i.e. hearing it on TV or listening to nursery rhymes rather than have someone interact with her in it every day). She does have a good understanding of our minority language, she responds to requests and knows names of lots of objects. I don't think she understands English yet.

My second worry is that because we are not planning on sending her to a nursery until she is 2.5 - 3 years old, she may be way behind with her English by then and wonder how long it may then take her to catch up with the other children.

Are there any parents out there who can share their experience in a similar situation with a baby growing up in a ML@H household who did no have much early exposure to the majority language. When did your LOs start talking and how quickly did they catch up with English once in nursery / school?

I appreciate that each baby is different and develops in their own time but I'm really interested in others' experiences. Thanks!

Don't worry about English. She will pick it up quite quickly once she goes to nursery/ school.

My eldest son was 2 before he really said anything. His main home language was English, but we live in Greece, and his Greek was quite poor when he started nursery at 3. He soon caught up with all the other children, and now at the age of 5 his Greek has overtaken his English. The same thing happened with my daughter. She started nursery last September at 3 years old, and until then only really spoke in English. Now her Greek is at about the same level as her English.

You will find as time goes on you will want to reinforce your own language, not English. I have children's TV programmes in English for them to watch and continue to speak only English at home, and I have a lot of children's books in English to read with them. You might like to do the same sort of thing with your language.

Not much experience of this particular set-up but I know it has worked well for other people.

It is not unusual for bilingual children to be slightly later in their speech without it being indicative of any problems; they just need a bit longer to lay the foundations as it were.

As she gets older she will be interacting more with other children even at playgroup or out in the park, so I would expect her active English language development to start before she goes to nursery.

Anyway, catching up at 2.5 or 3 shouldn't be a problem. My db was that age when he was adopted from abroad: he had pretty well caught up within half a year/a year- and that is completely from scratch.

I think your set-up sounds rather good.

cory and alexpolismum, thanks very much for your responses, I find them very reassuring. I have read that it's likely that once young children are properly exposed to the majority language especially through interaction with their peers, they may actually start rejecting the minority language so I have got lots of Russian (our minority language) books and nursery rhymes and once she's older, will get Russian DVDs for her to watch.

It's hard not to worry being a first time mum, I just want to make sure I'm doing everything I can to help her develop her language skills in both languages! :)

Minority language at home is the method we chose for us.
I'm native speaker of Spanish. My husband is English but speaks Spanish fluently, and we live in London.

From what I've read and seen, the age a child starts speaking varies depending on the child and anywhere between 12 months to 36 months is considered within the norm. Of course, if the child starts speaking around 12m or earlier would be considered an early speaker, and those at the end of the range would be called late speakers, and raise some worries from their parents up till the point they start talking.

My ds said what could be recognised as his first word at 15 months. It wasn't a proper word, but I could understand how he chose it to point at balls, anything that was round like a ball, and anything that rolled like a ball.
At 16m he said his first proper word in Spanish for water. Soon after that he also started using "mama" and "papa" properly when he called for us, not just babbling.
From then on, he started learning a new word a month, then every two weeks, then every week. By the time he was 23 months he knew a total of 110 words (97 in Spanish, 13 in English).

Then we went to my country for holiday and he had what is called the "language explosion" there, which occurs typically around 20 months according to the books. He learned about 10-20 new words per day, from talking with my parents and local people around. He learned verbs, and started combining words and making his first simple sentences of two words.
When we came back to the UK, in the next 3 months he progressed really quickly and was already talking in long sentences, having proper conversations and telling stories in the minority language.
I find this topic (language developing) fascinating and always read everything I can on multilingualism. I documented as accurate as I could his progress and that's why I can look back now and remember how it all started.
I'm sure your daughter will be fine and follow the same way.

Now, regarding the majority language, in our case that was the English.
He has been exposed to it since he was 8m old by going to nursery 2 days a week. At playgroups he didn't necessarily picked up any English as I spoke to him actively in the minority language no matter what. And I was also lucky to meet other parents with children of similar age who were also Spanish speakers.
I knew he could say a few words in English because at home he sometimes pointed at things and said them. But by the time he was 2y3m, a teacher at his nursery told me she was impressed because he finally had said "sit down" at nursery, and from this comment I realised he was not really talking at nursery because at home I knew he could say "sit down" since 5 months earlier. We then decided to read him one bed story in English sometimes (my husband), and I read him a book, sort of like a bilingual pictionary, and taught him vocabulary in English. He could already say the names of all the pictures in Spanish, I taught him how they call them at nursery. That was a turning point. About a month later he was already talking a lot, and eventually his teachers told me he was a chatter box in English as well.

So just play it by ear. By the time she goes to nursery/school, see how quickly/easy she picks up the other language. If you find she is struggling, you can give her a little help until she picks up the language and starts managing herself. Then stop any help for the majority language and focus on the minority language. That's how we did it.

Re rejecting the minority language later in life, ime (=own family plus I used to run an NCT group for foreign mums) whether a child ends up rejecting their minority language will depend on a whole host of factors:

*whether it creates tension in the family (because one parent is not supportive or because either parent is over-tense/obsessed with the subject- like fussing over food can create food issues)

*whether there are fun things associated with the minority language- films, books, family games that they can only access in that language

*whether they are ever in a situation where they have to use the minority language to communicate with other people than their immediate family

*whether, when they hit the pre-teen stage, they associate the minority language with contact with their peers and not just with stuffy old mum and dad (doesn't have to be actual physical contact: pen-friends or the internet will do fine)

My ds is 12 and is rejecting pretty well everything about me: my dress sense, my cooking, my taste in family outings. But he is not rejecting my language, because he needs that to speak to his cousins, who are a lot more cool than I am.

Very interesting comment from Cory re: rejecting the minority language later in life. I have yet to face that situation, but I know the challenges are just around the corner.

I was lucky my ds (who is only 3) never rejected the minority language. He actually embraced it, only wanted to read books and watch movies in that language (still does), and would tell my husband and I off if we were speaking to each other in English at home (that was the language DH and I were used to when talking to each other).

But I can already see the English becoming stronger, and slowly trying to take over. Only a few days ago I noticed when he is playing by himself the dialogues of all his characters are 90% English/10% Spanish. It used to be the other way around until not long ago. I wasn't sure what to think/do about it, so decided that since it is his own playtime he was free to do/speak in which ever language he wanted to experiment with, as long as when he adressed me he would do it in the minority language. Which he did, until a couple of days ago when for the first time he started trying to comment things from his game and ask me questions in English! I used the same old techniques that have been discussed here: asking what did you ask me?/ rephrasing his question in the target language, etc. It worked, so far.

Then yesterday we went to the park, and just randomly as he was playing with a ball two friendly dogs came to play with him, and as it turned out the owner was Spanish and as soon as she heard him speaking in Spanish she started talking to him and said that the dogs only understood Spanish and they were playing a lot and had a great time.

I thought what a great chance encounter that reinforces that knowing the other language can be useful and used with other people/and dogs! apart from mummy and daddy.

But then I worry that when we move out of London (as it is our plan), these random chance encounters will be hard to find.

And he doesn't have any cool cousins on my side of the family so far. All his cousins of similar age are on his father's side, so their language will be English!