Bilingual baby, advice needed please

[CakeBump]

Hi there

I am English, DP German, living in Germany.

I'm expecting DC1 at the moment and one of the questions that has come up has been how to manage the bilingualism.

DP is fluent English, my German is good, but not fluent. I will definitely be communicating with the baby in English, as I wouldn't feel comfortable in German.

DP seems to have more of a choice, he is fluent and equally comfortable in both languages. My view is that each parent should speak their own language to the baby, so me English and DP German. DP is however worried that with just me speaking English, the baby won't have enough exposure, so he wants to speak English to it too.

However, I am worried that if we only speak English at home the baby won't pick up German until it goes to kindergarten, and none of our German family or friends speak English so it won't be able to communicate with them at first.

Should DP speak English or German to the baby?

Can he start off by speaking German and then flip to English once the baby is in kindergarten? I am worried (like DP) that once the child starts school, English will be very much the minority language... so maybe at that point we could make it the lead language at home?

Argh, what to do?

Many thanks if you've got this far....

oh, and could anyone please recommend a good book on the subject?

Thanks

Sorry to guve a rushed reply but I suggest you Google 'one parent one language approach' :)

Friends have the same constellation. Their solution: mum speaks German, Dad speaks English, family language is English and outside language (Kindergarten, playground etc) is German.

So your child would have more English without losing the OPOL system.

Dad should speak German, mum English. But make sure you both do equal chores/housework/cleaning. I went to school with a bilingual boy, his mum spoke to him in Dutch and was a stay at home mum - he only struggled with things like 'vacuum cleaner' because mum did all the housework and dad never used the vac.

Hi,

I enclose a link- I found the book: Growing Up with Two Languages-A Practical Guide- quite useful and very readable.

Y.

sorry forgot the link!!

www.bilingualism-matters.org.uk/resources/bilingualism-and-home/

We chose the home language/out language approach as we wanted our dc to have really good English.

There is no doubt your dc will end up with good German, so for me the English as a strong language would win the day.

Plus I hate the OPOL approach, so that helped define it.

I live somewhere bilingualism/multilingualism is the norm and I also work and volunteer in a school environment. The one thing that stands out is that the children brought up with parents following OPOL speak English / French / Dutch as flawlessly as you'd expect if they were being brought up with only one language and the children brought up with parents speaking a second language they are not completely fluent in themselves are the ones that tend to have poor spoken language, either grammatically, lacking completely in fluency in relation to their age, lacking in confidence as they are aware their language skills are poor, plus especially speaking English / French / Dutch with a pronounced accent which marks them out as not native speakers!! Speaking to your children in the language(s) which is (are) your mother tongue(s) is really the way to go, it's natural and logical.

Hi! We are the same (i'm british, dh German) altho we lived in the UK until dc3 was 2 (now in Germany).
From all our bilingualism experience, I can only say its not easy no matter which approach you take and it requires a lot of work from both of you. My dd is now 11 and I think completely bilingual (able to read & converse fluently & correctly in both) but there are still words that she only knows in 1 language and not the other.

I would stick roughly to OPOL but there may be some flexibility in situations because you both speak the other language well. But with OPOL the baby will grow up knowing which parent speaks which altho they might show a preference to one language - ds1 much prefers German - really have to force him to speak English to me.

Good luck with it all - the rewards are definitely worth the hard work.

PS even when the parents do speak this second language to their children to a very high standard that it is near native level, the usual result is still an accent. For example, I know a few children who go to an English school, their parents speak their second language of English to them at home, instead of picking up an accent in English like British English or American English, they speak Dutch accent English, Latvian accent English, French accent English, whereas their classmates with parents who use OPOL and speak their mother tongue languages with their parents end up copying the accents of the mother tongue English speakers in their class and the accents of their mother tongue English speaking teachers. Again I see this at a local French school too.

Definitely have each parents speaking his/her mother tongue. However fantastic your dh's English is, there will be tiny errors that you probably don't notice and it's better to have native speaker levels in each language.

In cases where both parents speak the minority language, I think whether the child picks up the foreign parent's accent will depend on how much they trust that parent's competence= how much of a chance they get to compare with other native speakers.

Dh has sometimes spoken Swedish to dc, but they worked out very quickly (by comparing with me and other Swedish relatives) that his accent is awful and very soon started to tell him not to e.g. read Swedish books to them. They are less bothered by my accent when speaking English- but that could just be because it is rather better

I'm honestly not sure it's so much an issue in their first year. My DC only heard English in their first year or so, although we were in Germany at the time (we're both English speakers), then went to German Kita at 13/16 months and picked up German perfectly - now they're pretty much equally competent in both at 13/10yo.

Something that will become more important when your DC are older is whether you live in a large city, where there are more English-speaking families and English-language schools/nurseries, or in a smaller village/town where they will grow up pretty much as 'the only British in the village'.

If their education is going to be German only, then English at home will be all the more important, so you might want to go for both of you using English as a family language. If they will learn to read and write English, and have others of their age speaking it, then OPOL will be enough. Obviously, if you can get them into bilingual education their writing especially will be much more competent than if you're relying on a single native speaker at home (ie you).

My DC have been to bilingual schools all the way and it really shows at this point. Not only are they much more evenly balanced in their competence, but also they have loads of friends with international backgrounds who also speak English at home, so they don't feel 'the odd one out', and are as such unlikely to reject English as a home language later. This has happened to several families we know where the kids were schooled in German only - it's horrible if your DC answers you in German all the time and you have to persist with English as something of a chore.

natation, my experience is completely different from yours.

I know several families who use OPOL where the children speak with really bizarre accents, no idea where they got it from. Whereas in the families where both parents speak the same language to a high level of competence, the children sound native in that language (and sometimes speak the second language with an accent, sometimes not).

Not that I think accents matter a damn....

I think it totally depends on the child.

I know an OPOL family with two children; one speaks both languages perfectly to native level (aged 8) and the second speaks the majority language to native level but the minority language with a very heavy "foreign" accent.

Both children have same exposure to both languages but very different results.

In the end it has to be down to what feels right to your dh, imo. To me, it just felt wrong to talk to dh and the dc in different languages, it would make 3 or 4 way conversations (which are the norm in our house as we are all here all day long) in which I either switched languages in mid conversation, or I was talking to one or the other in the 'wrong' language.

I know couples where each parent speaks to the dc in one language and they speak to each other in a third language. That does my head in, but due to circumstances they cannot do otherwise (neither speaks the other's mothertongue, nor the third language, to a high enough standard).

OK to be a bit flexible I think to create the right environment. I speak English to mine, dh Italian. Community language is French and school is English and French. I speak Italian to dh, so sometimes we all speak Italian (though I didn't do this really in the early years - it seemed odd to mix up languages when they hadn't really learned to talk). We got an Italian babysitter for after school this year as their Italian was clearly weaker - their vocabulary started to seem quite limited compared to the other languages. They don't have an accent in any of the languages, but I think they make more grammar mistakes than they might do if they had one language. But I have no basis for comparison as absolutely everybody we know has bi, tri or quadrilingual children, because of where we live and what we do.

I think the key is to remember that children have to have a substantive social use for the language in order to bother to speak it. One parent is probably not enough in the long run.

Imo it is important not to panic if everything isn't perfect in the early stages. Ds went through phases of refusing to speak first one language, then the other, at different times his accent or grammar seemed influenced by the other language- it's all corrected itself with time.

I also think I had an unrealistic idea of what a child's Swedish ought to sound like: I tended to think everything dc got wrong- whether with pronunciation or grammar- was due to my failing to provide a proper bilingual experience. And then we went back to Sweden for the hols and I heard their cousins... It was quite clear that ds struggled with exactly the same sounds and concepts as they did, not because he was bilingual, but because he was a child. And in many ways he was actually better than they were.

Cory
I quite agree with your last post.
My children are French - English bilinguals.

I can't tell you how many people comment on how they mispronounce 'th' sounds in English, citing how hard it is for Frenxh people. Firgetting that many monolingual English speaking children struggle with 'th' at first. And my children didn't / don't replace it with the 'ze' sound which most Frenxh speakers do, but with a hard 'd' sound.

OP - if your DP is German and the community language is German, your DC will need to hear a lot of English in order to achieve monolingual-standard English in the long term. But I don't think that the right answer is for your DP to speak English to his DC. Better to look out for other English-speaking families, to get an English-speaking nanny or au pair if you are at work etc.

We are in France and my DD speaks French to her father and to her two stepbrothers. She goes to a bilingual school, however, and I buy her loads of quality English DVDs (which, contrary to what many people claim, are ace at developing vocabulary and expression).

I think Bonsoir put her finger on it in her last sentence: DVDs, like books, are actually brilliant at developing vocabulary and expression.

What they will not do is to turn a child bilingual on their own: you can't plonk a child in front of a French TV channel and expect them to grow up French speaking, because language requires an active component. But once you have that active component catered for, then expanding your horizon through films and songs and books is going to make a big difference to the depth and quality of their language.

I disagree Bonsoir - if the mother only speaks English to the dc, reads to the dc in English and they have some input from English TV or DVDs then I think that should keep them at a similar level to their monolingual peers. My dc only hear English from me and are completely fluent.

Once they get in to the school system then I think its up to the parents to do additional work in English at an appropriate level as I think the written work is where they end up falling behind their peers.

How old are your DC, Ploom?

I meant I disagree that they need input from other English speakers day-day. Agree about the good quality films and programmes.