Bilingual family chat thread

[teafortwo]

I come from a very mono-linguistic background. All my family and extended family speak the same language and being able to speak another language was seen as something rather nice but not really necessary for life. A bit grammar "Ooooh aaaarrr - d'jya know 'e gows to Grammar school yeeeaah! 'e even tawks French, my God!" I suppose.

My family are lovely and deep thinking clever people who don't talk like that - but it is just to show you in a sentence what I mean!

So... it is intensely fascinating and a great challenge to find myself bringing up a bilingual daughter.

I am a bit very addicted to reading any articles or books on bilingualism and am keen to know people in real life who are also bringing up bilingual children. Actually most of my friends children speak two languages - Some Moldavian friends of mine gasped at the idea that I only speak English fluently... "Just English? But how do you live?!?" They asked - as if I had announced I never drink water.

I thought - it might be fun to have a kind of Mumsnet bilingual chat thread where we can talk about the day to day highs, the lows, the funny bits and the sad bits of having a bilingual family and swap advice, ideas, theories, reading material (I am after a good summer read) and anything-else it would be useful to pool.

So.... .... what do you think?

In a similar spirit to Teafortwo 9plugging the gap with relevant news) can I publicise my (higly relevant) new blog?

It's at

papaetpiaf.wordpress.com/

and it's brand new.

Thoughts welcome.

S

Can I ask a question? My DD is 11 months and I am South African and speak Afrikaans to her at home, DH is English and is learning but only speaks English. When we are alone I speak to DD in Afrikaans and DH speaks English when we are all together we speak english or DH feels left out of our conversations. DD has started saying a few words in English and I repeat them in Afrikaans to her. We are having a problem with her understanding some english words though - We were playing with her zoo the other day and DH asked her to get an elephant and she looked at him confused then I asked her to give an elephant to papa in Afrikaans and she immediately gave it to DH. Is this normal? My MIL thinks we are confusing her brain. It doesn't seem to be effecting her speach at the moment.

Hi, if you are at home with her during the week, I expect she is just getting more varied and more intense Afrikaans input, so she knows more vocabulary in Afrikaans than in English. I am sure it is absolutely no problem at all.

Are you in the UK? If so, when she begins nursery or school, any gaps she may have in English will soon be filled, possibly then the problem will be maintaining and further developping Afrikaans.

I think it's nothing to worry about, honestly. Presumably MIL like many English speakers is monolingual and just doesn't know about multilingual development from her own experience.

HI

Yes we are in the UK keep language up once she starts school is one of my worries! But we are lucky that my parents have moved to the UK too so she is often surrounded by the language completely. Yes my MIL is monolingual and I think my speaking a differnet language to DD just irritates her as she can't interfere!

Oopsa - my experience is that what you describe is completely normal and you are not "confusing her brain" at all - in fact, what you are doing is using the most widely approved (though not the only) means of fostering bilingualism, ie one-person-one-language (OPOL). If anything, I would advise speaking Afrikaans to your daughter whoever is present - you can always paraphrase or translate to your husband; or he can work out from context what you are saying; or he can accept that, in the context of speaking to a one-year-old, it's probably not that riveting for him anyway!

If you have discussed elephants with your daughter in Afrikaans and your husband has not discussed them in English, then how can she be expected to respond to the English word? When she learns it, she will.

We have been going through animal noises recently (daughter 18 months) - initially she only responded to "que dit le serpent?" in French and "what does a monkey say?" in English - because I'd spoken to her more about snakes and her mum had talked more about monkeys. In a matter of minutes, we made her bilingual on both these animals and she now answers correctly (and very comically) whichever language she is asked in.

Pitchounette - still pondering your question. I'm told that DS2 has a "better" accent than DS1. How that came about I have no idea. I don't think they make the same mistakes ... But they make strange mistakes in English as well... I'm going to be optimistic and say they'll grow out of it ... And stop asking difficult questions.

MIFLAW - I am already a massive fan of your blog... it is briiiiilllliiiant!!! Have you got an apple? If yes maybe you could use garage band to record and publish Piaf's first words in French and songs and poems too rather like petiteanglaise does with tadpole...

www.petiteanglaise.com/

I thought you might be amused to know... [giggles emotion] - it took me a while to adjust my brain to you being an 'in touch with nature' (I am guessing from the very efficient looking coats) man type and not the urban hippyish lesbian type I had in my mind when chatting with you on this thread and a few others I have bumped into you on!!!

OOPSA - A dear friend of mine speaks Greek, Arabic, English and French. She had her children in France so she only knows how to speak about babies and birth fluently in French.

Most bilingual people feel more comfortable in one language than another in particular subjects. Elephants are obviously easier to get in Afrikaans!!!

Another example is - I remember when I was teaching a class of mainly Urdu and English speaking children generally they could use the language of school very fluidly in English and the language of home very fluidly at home. However, generally, they had no idea how to say subtract or pentagon in Urdu or maybe for example they would only come across the words 'saucepan' or 'duster' in English for the first time ever if the word was used in a text used in literacy hour.

What seems a bit weird to me is... my daughter has a dolls house and although English is the stronger language of our home she plays solely in French when playing with her dolls house!!!! The only reason I can think of is that she has named the little people after a family she speaks with in French (they speak French and Chinese) they speak French with her in real life so why on earth would the doll versions of them be speaking of all languages English???

DD starts school in September ALL tips for pushing home language as much as possible are VERY welcome indeed!!!

Thanks for support re blog - v kind! In touch with nature? Don't know about that. Former mod and brought up a seaside dweller, certainly ...

< Oh heck 'former mod seaside dweller'- T42 re-adjusts her brain in regards to MIFLAW for the second time today!!!!>

Just posting to say all these stories are inspiring me. I'm currently pg with pfb. DH is Spanish and we live in Spain. We're planning an OPOL set up.

I have one question. I always thought I would find it really unnatural to speak to my baby in Spanish, but we got a dog about six months ago and I do all the "who's a good doggy wog?" type cooing in Spanish for some reason . Do you think I'll get the same urge with the baby?

By mod I mean "parka wearer and Northern soul listener" rather than "blade-carrying pier brawler" ...

You're planning to call your baby a good doggy wog?

Thanks everyone for your help. I was sure I was doing okay by DD but MIL put the spanner in the works as usual.

MIFLAW - your blog is fab.

Thanks Oopsa. Keep the faith ...

Am slowly getting used to the idea of me as a trendy lesbian.

Are you a man too, T42?

Hang on MIFLAW - while I have been imagining you as undoubtedly a hippy urban lesbian you have been thinking I am possibly a man!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha - gotta love t'internet!

Just to confirm I am of the female sort...

!!!

It was your opening post that did it, where you made out your family were basically the Archers. "E gows to grammar school" etc - so I just assumed you were a 'e rather than a she ...

aaaaahhh - butt it waznt me wot whent to grama skool!

Too buzzy drivin' em tractor, eh? Take 'em combine into Cahn'erbury, going up BIG city!

So... where were we on this bilingual stuff...??? Anyone feeling brave enough to answer P's question??? - I am still thinking about it... I have a few ideas and want to see what you all think once they can form sentences...

Over here pronouns are making a remarkably strong appearance in dd's idiolect - AT LAST!!!

Interestingly, in English, she is yet to establish that 'his' is for when something belongs to a male and 'her' is when something belongs to female.

Cue dd waving off her Grandfather as he starts his drive to work explaining "Grandpa goes to work in HER car..."!!!

Ok Pitchounette - My feeling is - but I have no experience of this it is just my feeling....

We all know of the child who shows someone he is not happy by stomping his feet and sticking his tongue out and cries "Me want teet diiiie" but few of us will know of any adults that do this. Gradually as he grows he learns that this method of communication isn't completely effective and it changes without us being aware it has changed it just slowly dies away. This is because the child has slowly refined how to put the point across.

There are a variety of factors in play - a desire to conform, peer pressure, adults modeling acceptable behaviours and reactions to undesirable behaviour.

I think it is the same process happens with verbal communication but it is perhaps more subtle. We use the way we can best put things forward to begin with and then slowly and steadily refine this (e.g My dd has refined how she asks for milk from 'Milt' to 'milk' to 'milk, please' to "May I have some milk please"). Your job is to offer some scaffolding towards this refinement.

You need to make sure your children have as much access and opportunity to 'get French right' as possible in as many ways possible. However, you OBVIOUSLY already know this - if they are speaking together in French you must be really making a brilliant job of providing lots of French and we all want to know all your secrets for getting them this far!!!

I think your children's French will continue to go from strength to strength and instead of worrying about errors they are both making you should of course repeat back sentences in the correct way but please also smile and find these little errors charming 'baby/children's talk' that will be gone in a blink of an eye but you will hold in your heart for the rest of your days!!!

Message withdrawn

Pitchounette

Only just considered your question really, but my initial instinct is, wouldn't the same be true if they were monolingual? And yet we all know that monolinguals "outgrow" (for want of a better word) such mistakes.

So I'm sure bilinguals do too.

Message withdrawn

I think I just went to www.YouTube.fr and searched for Leo Popi and it "popped" up (pun intended - sad but true.)

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/15/bilingual-family-french-children

I have just come across this rather relxed but seemingly effecive family article. What do you think?