Anyone bringing up bilingual twins?

[firsttimetwins]

Am 30 wks pg with identical twins. Myself and DP are native English speakers but live in Germany. Am concerned that the potential language difficulties twins seem to have anyway will be made worse by the fact that they'll have English at home and German everywhere else. Anyone got any experience?

No personal experience but a friend of mine has 15 mo b/g twins who are being brought up bilingual Spanish/English (and are also exposed to another language because we live in Galicia in NW Spain which has its own language - Galician).

AFAIK her experience has been normal - no extra mixing up, no language delay etc. It may be different for id twins though.

Good luck with the twins. I'm 30wks pg with my own future bilingual citizen, this one is only a singleton though! It's exciting stuff, isn't it?

Not personally, but my friend has 15yo twins. They live in Germany with their British parents.

They are fluent in both languages.

I would imagine that it will be easier for them to keep the English language going at home since they will speak to each other in English.

My DC are 2 years apart and speak a lot more German.

Do you have contact with German speakers?

Yes, we have a good number of German friends and do both speak German ourselves, though not at home. The plan is to send them to a fully German-speaking Kindergarten rather than a bilingual one, so that the emphasis in their pre-school years is on German, but I'm not sure whether that's the right thing to do either. I'm more concerned about the German than the English, I think, because although as I say we both speak German fairly well, it is still scattered with grammatical errors and so on and we won't really be able to help them with specific German schoolwork after a certain point (reading etc. will obviously be ok, I mean as they get more advanced).
So much to think about already!!