Non-native bilingualism

[ManIFeelLikeAWoman]

I am a native English speaker and so is my partner, but we are bringing our daughter (11 mth) up bilingual - I speak to her exclusively in French, her mum speaks to her exclusively in English, my partner and I speak English to each other. I know this is not a common set up but it is not without precedent and I know I am not alone on Mumsnet. So I wanted to see how many of us there are and how it's going, and to swap notes.

I'm NOT asking for anyone's opinion whether this is the "right" thing to do, especially from people who don't do this themselves; and I'm NOT talking about people who speak their own language with their children but take them to foreign-language classes. That's very interesting too, but it's another thread.

So - who's out there and how are you finding it?

Useful feedback, thanks! I do accidentally speak a bit of French to DD (tiens for eg) so it will be fairly easy just to up the ante a bit.

Two months on, how's everyone doing?

It's all gone quiet, so can I publicise my (higly relevant) new blog?

It's at

papaetpiaf.wordpress.com/

and it's brand new.

Thoughts welcome.

S

I take my hat off to you, MIFLAW, for keeping this going. My DCs are bilingual but not because of any linguistic effort on part - we both speak English at home(even though I could have spoken to them in French and my dh could have spoken to them in Dutch - we decided against the three language thing) but because they have French at school. Of course this has involved linguistic effort (helping with the homework, translating unknown words) but not the constant commitment you're making.

If I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about your dd's French not being perfect - it will still be streets ahead of most anglophone children's. Despite our DCs having been at school in French since the age of 3 (maternelle), we did find that they lacked some vocabulary compared to their Belgian friends because they had no adult imput. Also English has remained their mother tongue, partly I suspect due to the fact that I'm a SAHM and therefore their exposure to English is very high. I suspect therefore that they will never consider French their mother tongue despite having lived here all their lives. None of them seems particularly bothered about this!

Bonne continuation!

on our part

Fascinating & very pleased not to be the only one speaking a language other than my mother tongue with dd (15 mo). I "lived in" my other language for many years married to a native speaker who spoke no English. It felt right to speak that language with dd. At 15 months she has c.15 words/phrases in "our" language and a few less in English. She seems to expect there to be 2 words for everything now & already makes a choice of language (albeit with her v limited vocabulary) in different situations. She is very in to gestures too. There are times when I feel frowned upon but mostly that is from people who are monolingual & have no concept of living in another language. It seems less offensive to them with people with a parent from that country-even though they are non native speakers & do not speak the language fluently.

Thank you MIFLAW.

Apologies for my badly written post. You would never believe English is my first language would you!!

Hi,

We're doing this too. Hard to tell how it's going as my darling 20month old son is saying very little.

I am English and so is my partner, but I speak to my son in French. My husband understands everything and can join in sometimes but mainly speaks English to our son.

My son seems to understand 'head' and 'cat' in both languages so far but seems behind compared to his monolingual peers, who seem to be having entire little conversations with their parents.

I was reluctant to do this at first as I thought it would be unnatural, but was encouraged by my husband and friends and after a couple of weeks, I spoke to him in French without thinking about it and it tends to be what comes out of my mouth first these days. I speak English to him sometimes if I'm in company and I don't want to be ignorant, but I don't like doing this as I think it must be confusing and more and more, I'm just explaining the situation to people and getting on with it in French.

We have loads of books and TV via internet that we watch in both languages so he does get exposure to native speakers and though it can be scary, I'm keen to keep it up.

Good luck and let me know how you are getting on. Thanks so much for posting as this is a very unique situation and can be quite isolating.

Good to know there are others like us out there.

I`m a German native speaker, speaking english to our son.Family language is German.
Speaking English feels so natural to me.As you said ,I also had to learn it the hard way, and I think it´s a gift to him .Though it can be hard work sometimes

I am an English native speaker, living in England, speaking a mixture of English and Polish to my dd. My Polish is far from perfect and native speakers notice quite quickly that I'm not from Poland because of my poor grammar, probably. However, I can communicate pretty much anything I want to. I know that my dd is picking up my grammar mistakes but if it weren't for me speaking to her in Polish, she wouldn't get the chance to learn it at all. And she loves it. At 5 years old, she is quite happy to switch from one language to the other and plays with her toys in both languages, even when I'm not around. She is fully aware of what is said in what language and knows that there are some people she has to speak to in either English or Polish as they don't know the other language. She mixes with Polish speakers at least once a week and I was told recently that from her accent, she sounds just like a Polish child.
She has now decided to learn Spanish and can already say quite a lot just from watching Muzzy.

It was important for me to bring up dd with another language because my Polish father didn't speak Polish to us at home so I had to learn it the hard way. This has always been a bone of contention with me and my siblings as we all feel we were robbed of something that should have come so easily to us. I now try to encourage dad to speak Polish to dd but it is hard work as he keeps forgetting as he has been over here so long and English comes to him much more easily now. Can you tell I have "issues" about this? lol

I must say that everyone I have met has only had positive things to say about the fact that I am speaking a non native language to dd.

We were doing something a little similar, as French DH and I were both speaking French to DD in England in the hope of counterbalancing the overwhelming amount of English around. It worked very well until she was about 3; now I found that negotiating with a tantruming toddler whilst still using the correct subjunctive was more than I could cope with. I also felt rather sad that there were nuances I could not communicate and books we didn't share. Now I miss the chatting in French ... I am probably doing the worst thing of all; a bit of each. However, I console myself with the thought that most parenting involves doing most things in the wrong way.

Me and my DH are both English. I used to be fluent in French and learnt it to a high standard (post A level, part of a degree course). Kept it up on and off over the years but has gone rusty in the past six or seven years. I decided to start exposing my son to simple French from when he was 2.5 years old. Firstly though a bilingual CD of fun sons beautifully sung in English and French (all familiar songs he knew in English already). He started singing verses in French very quickly, so encouraged by this I enrolled him in a one hour a week toddler French class. Again, I was amazed at how he absorbed some things like a sponge. So I took the next step and found a part-time French nanny to spend a few hours a week with him and now (finally) I have started reinforcing his learning by saying some words to him in French myself. I don't expect this to lead to true bilingualism (so maybe I don't belong on this forum) but perhaps one of the lesser forms of bilingualism mentioned - i.e. passively understanding things and/or having French as a minor language with English dominating. I have taken the view that with a little effort I can give him a bit of a linguistic gift. At the stage he is at it doesn't seem to matter too much at the moment that I can't speak French fluently and easily to him. We are just learning vocabulary at the moment and that is something I can easily help him with. He picks up objects now (at age 2.8) and asks me 'what is this in French?' so I have to look it up in the dictionary if I don't know! I'm just seeing where this leads (no great expectations) but if I can help him learn a language at a time of his life when it is easy for him then great! He also has the benefit that we live in quite a French area so he is acquiring French friends through nursery school. When he starts school he could even go to a French curriculum out of school club with the French children if his French is good enough by then. Therefore, I think there real opportunities for him to build on basic French skills with involvement in the local French community as he gets older.

We have 4 children and live in a French area, the youngest 3 are educated in French. My French is pretty fluent and I think alot in French, but still sometimes I cannot think of words exactly in French.

I speak French to our 2 youngest children because they speak French to me and with each other. I speak English to our 2nd eldest child because that is the language he prefers, he moved into French education aged 10 so it is less easy for him to speak French at home, compared to his younger siblings who prefer to speak French over English.

But if we are all speaking as a family, we all tend to switch to English. But if we have French friends over, which is nearly every morning before school, then the whole family speaks in French.

No-one in the family speaks French as a first language, but I don´´t find anything wrong or unnatural about us speaking to each other in a second language. Outside the home, it is alays in French, inside it depends on the context, we switch languages according to who is speaking and depending on whether we have French only speakers in the home.

Interesting thread. Don't have time to read it all now but will come back to it.

I was brought up with a lot of families who did what you are doing - in this case the second language was English. Unfortunately many of them became utterly proficient in Spanglish and not much else - many had worse English than me (I was taught it traditionally at school starting at around age 2).

I decided to not talk to ds in my mt based on this experience - after many years of functioning in English my Spanish is not as correct as it should be. Dc will be doing their schooling in Spanish so will become bilingual that way.

I'm sure it can work, but there is a risk of severe Franglais and I would watch out for that.

"I'm sure it can work, but there is a risk of severe Franglais and I would watch out for that."

I'm afraid I don't see how there is a higher risk of Franglais than in any other OPOL family. Mixed codes are normal in small children anyway, but I imagine this would only persist if a clear division between the two languages was not built into the set up.

The other risk would be from a parent who used a lot of loan words in his French, but I am careful not to do so for precisely that reason, even when to do so might be acceptable on the mainland.

I can see that there is a risk of passing on faults, but that is not the same, and would normally come from parents who were regularly speaking outside their linguistic comfort zone.

No, there probably isn't more risk than with opol. But oplol does have a high risk of it in general ime.

How so? Surely OPOL has a lower risk of language mixing than other strategies?

I find that any bilingual child will at some point speak franglais or spanglish because they don't know the word in one language or the other.

OPOL has the advantage that parents will be in the habit of correcting the child so they speak only one language, thus automatically filling in the gaps, so I agree with MIFLAW.

Franglais is one of my pet hates - 'Can I have some jus d'orange?' makes me want to tear my hair out - but by insisting a child is in the habit of using only English words in English, French words in French (Chinese words in Chinese etc), providing correction where necessary and modelling consistent use of one language (which is practically the cardinal rule of OPOL!) you eliminate the likelihood of the hybrid language persisting.

I'm quite vigilant at stopping this hybrid language business, but when I meet fellow Chinese brought up in Malaysia/Singapore we wallow in mixing as many languages and dialects as we can remember. >

I guess it's just down to the parents' vigilance. My opol nieces and nephews are dreadful mixers. With the trilingual ones it gets pretty .

It is but it is so much fun. I look forward to the day when I feel secure enough to do it with my kids.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen in OPOL families or non-native families - but you seem to be suggesting it's actually caused by one or both of those factors and I don't how.

To put it another way, which bilingual set-up do you think would have LESS chance of producing Franglais than OPOL (native or otherwise) and why?

I'm not an expert and only speak from my experience, but from what I've seen children with one language at home and one out of the home blend less.

But of course it depends on having that available, which is just not the case for most people!

My DD lives in a OPOL bilingual family and goes to a bilingual school and she doesn't mix at all, except when she doesn't know a word in the language she happens to be speaking at the time, in which case she will ask "How do you say xxx in French [English]?"

She makes a few syntactical errors from time to time, but they are not systematic by any means.

All this talk about which system is best etc etc, we never even think about it in our home. The languages are mixed constantly in our home, but with consistency according to the situation. Last night we had my French / weaker Dutch friend with her completeley bilingual French / Dutch parents, me French / English / weak Dutch and husband English / weak French. 6 out of 7 children speak French fluently, one child English / weak French, 2 children only French, friend´s youngest has French at home / comprehends English and learning to speak now in both languages. We all get along fine in the 3 languages. Which language is used depends on who is talking to who. I don´t find any mixing of languages in the children at all, sometimes they say a word in the other when they do not know it in the other language, just like BONSOIR wrote in her post.

I look after my friend´s youngest 2 days a week, have done for the past year. I only ever speak to him directly in English, understands everything I say, the rest of the time he is in French so this language dominates, but he speaks in English when he has the vocabulary, he is only just 2 anyway. He is not even aware I speak English to him and that maman speaks French or that when I speak to his maman I change into French since she cannot understand English. To me this is just normal, don´t even think about any fancy method I am using.