Advice please

[crevee]

We are raising my DS (12mths) bilingual, i speak to him in english & my husband in berber. But we complicate things as my husband & i communicate mainly in french (we met & lived originally in France but now live in the UK) - do people think this is going to cause problems for him as we're not doing 1 person 1 language which i've heard is best?

Obviously he is not yet talking yet but if he says something to the other person in the "wrong" language how should you react - just say yes and repeat in correct language or what?

DH and I are raising our son (now 19mo) bilingual (English/Serbo-Croat), with both of us sticking to our native tongue when speaking to him, but speaking to one another in English. Most of DS's words, unsurprisingly, are in English (unsurprisingly because we live in an English-speaking environment, and his mother tongue is English, whereas his "father tongue" is the different one!).

DS hasn't seemed particularly concerned so far that his father speaks English to me, and various friends of mine have managed to get the children to speak the father's language (as opposed to just understanding it) by the father's speaking purely [whatever the language] to the children.

I occasionally have to resort to the formula: "That's right, darling. Tata says 'pas' and Mummy says 'dog'." Not sure how this will work for more complex grammar, but we are trying to set the idea of difference from the start. Unfortunately, my MIL mixes in a lot of English words when speaking to DS, which we are all (DH, FIL, and I - poor woman is surrounded!) trying to get her to stop doing. When she does that, I try to use the formula again: "'Pas'. Baka says 'pas' and Mummy says 'dog'."

A Polish father (his DW is British) we know had to repeat "What was that?" in Polish until DS1 replied in Polish. DS1 has a rather inhibited personality, so needed the extra push (think of it as gentle discipline, or coaching the child on how to eat with knife and fork), but now speaks it quite happily, even unconsciously, with his father. That family has now moved abroad, and DS2 (who is less inhibited than his brother anyway) apparently said his first recognisable word in French (from nursery/garderie, I suppose).

Children do seem to be able to sort things out eventually, and it can take longer for them to start speaking, but it is said to help them intellectually, since "more than one language" is a very abstract idea, and once a child grasps something as abstract as that, s/he will hopefully be more open-minded to other ideas.

Good luck with your efforts! It's a really worthwhile thing to do, and your DS will be a bigger person as a result , and will be able to communicate with all his relatives and family friends on both sides. If you ever get really worried, you could drop back to 2 languages, and re-introduce Berber later, although I'm not sure how best to manage that; it would be best to take further advice on that....

Crevee

Good luck! There are lots of books you can read on this and you'll get lots of advice on here. My advice is definitely stick with it.

For what it's worth it sounds like you ARE doing one parent one language - this refers to the language you speak to the child, not to each other (if you think about it, if you only ever spoke one language and you and your husband had different languages, life would be quite difficult for the two of you ...) So, my partner and I speak English to each other, I speak French to my daughter and her mother speaks English to her.

In terms of "wrong" language, I think it's a changing strategy with time. So, initially (up to about 18 months)I just acted "as if" my child had spoken french and replied in French; now I say, "maman dit "red," que dit papa?" and normally she knows - if she doesn't, I tell her, "papa dit "rouge""; the next stage (24 months onwards) will be the "pretending not to understand" game ("Comment?") I already tell her that I can't read mummy's books "parce que je parle pas l'anglais" and she accepts that.

I think you maybe relax these strategies a bit if the child is ill, tired or grumpy (though I've never relaxed it to the extent that I've spoken to her in English - I'm just more tolerant of her speaking english back to me.)

Just my experience but so far (22 months) it's working for our family.

BTW I think my experience also illustrates that, at this age, the child "ignores" what language you speak to each other - it's what you speak to him or her that he/she notices.

Stick with it and don't fuss to much if he speaks to you in the 'wrong' language.

Our DC are English/German bilingual from home, I speak mainly English, DH German. We are in French speaking environment so they speak French at school. We moved here a year ago so have only just learned French.

I never made a fuss about correcting them, just let them talk. I also was not so strict with OPOL and they are fluent in 2 languages, and very good in their third language.

Many people swear by OPOL, others do it differently. Do what you feel most comfortable with.

Very interesting, all of this!

crevee - you've gotten some really good advice here and I agree 100%. We only have English and German to deal with, but my kids, now 13 and 16 and fully bilingual, were never bothered by the fact that I spoke (and still speak, of course) English-only to them and German-only to their dad. We also did the Mummy says/Papa says game a lot when they were little. Your child will most likely start out with English and Berber and then pick up some French along the way from listening to you and your husband and realizing that this is yet another way to communicate. I don't think it will cause a problem at all.

We don't stick strictly to OPOL and my children (13 and 9) are still bilingual. I think it's the quantity of input that matters more than its indilutedness iyswim. As long as you speak lots to them in both the languages you want them to speak, it won't matter if they also hear you speak something else.

un-dilutedness

Thanks so much everyone, this is all really interesting and reassuring!

We try and stick to OPOL, no choice really as my DH only speaks English.
This is a bit long but might help. My DH and I speak English to each other (my DH is English and we live in the UK) but I have always only spoken Serbo-Croat (my mother tongue) to my daughter. She started speaking very early and her first language was Serbo-Croat for a while. We also had a native Serbo-Croat speaker nanny which helped a lot. My daughter spoke both languages and very amusingly sometimes translated things to my husband (who understands a bit of my mother tongue but not a lot). Now, I still only speak to her in Serbo-Croat but our current nanny is from an English speaking country so she is exposed to English only most of the time (I work full time). As a result her instinct is now to speak to me in English but I always ask her to repeat it "the way mama says it" and she does it most of the time, but not always. I am determined to keep it going. She clearly is not using my mother tongue as often any more and I really don't want her to forget it.
The things is they are clever little things and twig pretty quickly who understands what and speak to people accordingly.
The reason I ask my daughter to repeat things in my mother tongue is that if I don't then she will just forget the language. But if you both speak both languages and use both languages in fairly equal amounts then your child should be able to pick up both easily.