How to raise child bilingually when some of DH´s family won´t understand what I´m saying.

[Cies]

I´m ttc first child atm and thinking about how it´ll work bringing him/her up bilingually. I´m English, living in Spain with Spanish DH. We are both keen on doing OPOL in our home and are both convinced of the benefits of it. I speak Spanish fluently, and DH speaks English fairly well. Personally I cannot imagine speaking to my children in a foreign language.

But, I wonder about how it works in the wider world, outside the small family circle.

E.g., we spend a lot of time with DH´s family, and see nephews and nieces interact with grandparents and aunts and uncles.

A typical conversation this weekend involved MIL, her DIL and her DD (MIL´s DGD)

child- "Granny, can I have some gum?"
mum- "no María, you can´t have chewing gum now, you have to wait until after lunch."
grandmother- "yes María, you must wait. I´ll give you some gum after lunch if you are good."

Now, how would this sort of thing work out if the mother is speaking a language that the grandmother doesn´t understand?

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hmm.. this is hard. I favour all the theory behind OPOL but in practice I have found it harder than that. I ALWAYS speak english to ds (17mo) when we are alone. However I do occasionally slip into spanish when with dh/in laws. In the last few months I have become much more aware of it and am making a huge effort not to do it. If it's that important I can repeat it for their benefit. More often than not I am asked to anyway, extremely tediously, by dh's elderly aunt:

Me: 'are you tired baby?'
Baby: 'wah'
Aunt: 'what did you say?'
Me: 'are you tired baby?'
Aunt: 'do you think he understands you?'
Me: 'not really, he's only a couple of months old'
Me: ssh baby, it's ok
Aunt: 'what did you say'

etc ad infinitum

MIL and Elderly Aunt are completely bamboozled by the prospect that he might understand everyone. When he was little it was more directed at me but now he's a bit bigger and showing a lot of comprehension they doubt he understands them MIL said he speaks with an accent! hahaha.. he doesn't have a well formed word to his name!

Anyway that was a huge digression but it does make me laugh. Speaking in spanish around him was more something I did when he was really little and the comment I was making to him was really directed at someone else iykwim? Dh's english has improved a lot in the last year or so but if I want to be sure he's understood I do need to say it in spanish. you know, like those 'oh I bet you've done a poo, haven't you? Time to get your nappy changed' indirect comments with lots of meaningful looks in dh's direction

BUT I want to know what those with older kids/ more experience do about the family situation? I mean dh and I speak Spanish so if we are all sitting around at dinner sharing a meal and conversation, should I speak Spanish to dh, english to ds and dh would speak spanish to me and catalan to ds?

This is what we (mostly) do now but it does get a bit confusing..

My experience also suggests that OPOL works very well.

We (me German, dh English) are raising our 2 children (4,6) bilingually, living in the UK.

As I am representing the 'minority' language I am aware of the importance of me speaking German to the children as much as possible. In fact, I have always spoken to them in German and German has become the language that we associate with each other. When I do have to address them in English (say, when they have friends over and I'm addressing them all together), it feels quite 'unnatural'.

Helpfully, my dh is learning German so he understand most of what we say. Otherwise the children or me translate for him. All our relatives are very supportive of us raising our children bilingually and we've never had any problems/issues. Of course I or the children will speak to any non German speaker in English, but 'our' language together is German. After all, its my mother tongue and feels the most natural to me!

I have several friends/acquaintances who are also raising their children bilingually and there appear to be 2 reasons why some families don't succeed:

1. OPOL is not adhered to i.e. the parent speaking the minority language often also speaks to the children in the majority (environment) language. The children therefore have no more incentive to speak the other language.

2. the parent speaking the minority language just doens't spend enough time with the children (due to work or whatever). In that case there isn't enough input of that language.

A final point re. homework: When my children bring English reading books home (and daddy isn't home), they/we read the words in English and we discuss it in German. Its become totally natural for us and doesn't seem to confuse them in the slightest. In fact, I find it may help them to understand the story better.

Am very interested to read about other families' experiences!

The reason OPOL is recommended is that it is one method that works. This is not in itself proof that it is the only method that works.

OPOL is very much a modern Western phenomenon; bilingualism, on the other hand, is worldwide and not confined to our era. (I have done a fair bit of research on bilingualism for a scholarly paper I am preparing and it seems people can and do become bilingual in all sorts of ways.)

Since OPOL is the approved method in our society it is statistically likely that this is the method that a higher proportion of the most committed parents will choose- and the most committed parents are the ones that are most likely to succeed anyway. I think the crucial factor may well be commitment level rather than any particular method. This would explain why I and others have succeeded in other ways- because we were equally committed.

The beauty of the OPOL IMO is that it functions as a sort of reality check on your commitment/linguistic input; you are going to notice very quickly if you are not giving your child enough language exposure and it is easier to make your child speak enough of the language if that is the only way they can communicate with you. Easier but not the only way possible.

Not criticising other people's choice in any way; I'm sure OPOL is fine. But it seems strange to me to be told that children could not possibly become bilingual the way I have brought mine up- and then turn round and listen to dd who honestly could walk into a Swedish secondary school tomorrow without seeming out of place. I don't suppose the odd nursery rhyme in the wrong language when she was little did her any harm.

cory talks sense!

While I'm doing OPOL with DC (because there's not many people speaking my language to them) I certainly did not grow up with OPOL. And I shall certainly adjust our "method" as we grow.

The existence of cory and her children is proof that OPOL is NOT the only method that works. Which is reassuring.

In the end, I don't think it matters which method you use as long as your are consistent and there is plenty of regular exposure to both languages.

My thought is that OPOL is precisely the method that works in the west. My guess is that in the rest of the world the different languages have certain functions and status in a multilingual society and people have to become competent in different languages to get on in life. eg. home language and working language. In the typical situation in Europe (like the one Cies finds herself in) one language is highly vulnerable to being taken over by the dominant language. The child knows both parents communicate in the dominant language and copies them! Absolutely logical. This does not lead to bilingualism. OPOL is far more likely to achieve that aim though there are no guarantees. Even highly committed parents can not force their child to actively speak the minority language, hence the number of threads in this topic where people do ask how to get their child to speak!

Cory, it´s great that your method has worked so far but I think it´s a question of odds. The odds were against your method working and still are in the majority of similar cases. As your children move into the teenage years and the classic stage where they completely refuse to speak the minority language, I would say that you are in a weaker position that a parent who respected the OPOL idea. Your children do have an emotional attachment to you as an English speaker that is absent in OPOL families I know. This makes your language easier to dispense with when teenagers go through the rejecting the parents stage.

Cory, you´ve thrown up another point when you say your children could walk into a Swedish secondary school, unnoticed. Are you sure about this? I really wonder about this. I´ve lived abroad many years and spoken relatively little English. My native language skills have deteriorated and become dated. I don´t know words that are in common parlance anymore ("chav" was a mystery a to me for a while). Languages I learnt 10 years ago sound oddly dated to native speakers in that country now. Slang moves on fast. A Swedish lady I know said her children sound middle aged when they are forced to speak Swedish during holidays in Sweden. They certainly wouldn´t fit in to a Swedish secondary school : ( And she did use OPOL...

It would be fascinating to know more about situations where parents did not use OPOL (parents do not share a language, live in one of their respective countries) but managed to bring children up to be adult blinguals. Also your type of situation sing, how did you become bi/multi lingual?

I did explain that we spend the summers in Sweden. Dd who is an unbelievably social person goes out and makes friends locally and then keeps in touch with them during the year. She has a much stronger regional accent than I ever did and her language skills seem very up-to-date as far as I can judge. She has also got Swedish penfriends and has recently joined an internet forum.

But I fail to see how OPOL is relevant to this particular aspect of language learning- modern slang isn't something she would be learning from her 45yo Mum anyway. It's what you learn from your friends. As you point out, it was an OPOL lady who said her kids sounded middle-aged when they spoke Swedish- so OPOL clearly hadn't made that much difference- one can see why.

Anyway, slang is something you can pick up fairly quickly: if my dd did not know the latest slang but had a good general grasp of the language, I would think that was quite good enough to be getting on with. Besides, slang varies regionally- if I had moved from Gothenburg to Stockholm as a child I would have sounded middle-aged. Didn't mean I wasn't a native speaker.

Nor do I believe that dd's emotional attachment to Swedish is going to be that much fainter because I occasionally speak a bit of English. She has always considered herself to be half of each, and so does ds.

Her identity is being bilingual and her strongest role model is her bilingual Mum. Copying me would not leave her monolingual, quite the contrary. We are a bilingual family and being bilingual is the norm as far as she is concerned: it's what everybody in her family does. (though ds, bless him, went through a phase of refusing to speak English when he was about 3- his playschool were very good about it ).

Admittedly, dd has not yet reached her teens (just about to turn 12), but she has been through some pretty traumatic and stressful times (due to disability and misdiagnosis) and has been fairly rebellious with it. I have taken just about every kind of crap you can from a pre-adolescent daughter, but it has not involved language. Perhaps because she doesn't think of bilingualism as something we are trying to impose on her, it's part of her own identity- she can't imagine not having that.

We also have several other bilinguals in the extended family (one aunt is Swedish/Chinese, one uncle works in Norway, both grandparents speak all the major European languages). To her, as it was to me, it's a normal thing for an adult to know several languages.

And she is emotionally attached to me as a Swedish speaker too. In fact, primarily as a Swedish speaker, seeing that I do speak more Swedish than English. If I occasionally coach her in her drama exercises or read her some Shakespeare, this is not going to negate all the hours we spend and have spent sharing jokes/telling stories/arguing in Swedish.

(It is admittedly a bit of a special situation in our family, as I am also better qualified than dh to teach English literacy- though a native speaker, he finds it difficult to express himself in writing, has read relatively little and is no good at spelling. And can't recite poetry without provoking howls of anguish from his audience, bless him! It's about as good as listening to a Vogon. As dd has spent over a third of the last 4 years absent from school for health reasons, this has become rather important. She would not be top in literacy if Mum hadn't taken responsibility for that side of things too. But I have yet to find that any harm has come of it)

I hope this will help you feel a bit more relaxed...

Background...

We were at a bbq in England with my English family none of whom speak French. My daughter is 2 with an English Mother, French/British Father and lives in France. We are flexible with language he is primarily her French influence and I am the English but there is some fluidity too.

So dd walks over to me and starts gabbling half in English and half in baby talk. I didn't get at all what she was talking about - "Sorry? what did you say?" I asked her confused.

"Oh!" my seven year old second cousin churped "Don't worry if you don't understand everything she says. She's a bit French, didn't you know?"

Thanks for that TeaForTwo and thanks for the background Cory, fascinating. I´m sorry if I offended you, this was completely unintentional.

This is so topical for me. I am French living in France with an Irish husband and a 20-month old DD and a 2 month old DS. I read quite a few books on bilingualism who all advocates OPOL but I found it very hard to stick to.
I speak in English with my husband so English is the language at home.
I believe that the LOs will be speaking French as they will go into the French schooling system so it is the English that needs pushing.
I end up speaking both languages to the children and I had been worried that it was confusing for them.
But I spoke to colleagues in the US who were brought up with 2 or 3 languages not in the OPOL format and who never had any problems.
I think I believe that motivation is key and that as long as this is a priority, it will turn out OK in the end.