Hello all,
I would be very grateful if you could share your experience if you had a situation similar to this:
We live in the UK and have one 3 year old DD. I am bilingual (Serbo-Croat/English) and I speak English only to my husband as he doesn't speak any SC. We have been bringing our daughter up bilingual from the start. She started speaking very early and spoke in SC mainly to start with, first because I was on maternity leave so she got mainly SC spoken to her (I still only speak SC to her) and then my mum used to look after her until she was 2. Then at the age of 2, by which time she spoke both languages, but her instinct was to speak SC, we got a nanny whose first language is English so for the last year the only SC my DD has had has been from me.
This has resulted in her understanding everything but speaking almost exclusively English, even to me, even though I speak to her in SC. I often ask her to repeat things in the way that "mama says it" and she does it willingly.
Sorry for the long winded introduction but my question is this:
Our current nanny is leaving and we will get a SC speaking au pair so I am hoping that this will help with my DD speaking the language a bit more.
Has this been experience of any of you? Does it actually come back? Or is it now too late?
I am really worried as would really like our daughter to speak SC as this is part of my (and her) heritage and I generally think that speaking foreign languages is a fantastic thing.
I would be grateful for any of your comments.
Many thanks