Raising a Bilingual or Multilingual Child: First Thoughts

photo by perpetualplum

There is life after pregnancy and I'm already starting to think about it. To that end, I attended a La Leche League meeting yesterday to get off on the right foot with breastfeeding, and to meet a community of like-minded women. But the most inspirational thing I found was a mother speaking English to the group and Spanish to her child. It was the most delightful thing to hear her say, "No te preocupas..." softly to her baby. It struck me as so special and intimate.

I have had latent thoughts about teaching our child a second language for a few reasons:

1. I want to keep my own language skills fresh.

2. I wish my parents had done that with me as a child.

3. Studies show that multilingual kids are smarter, wealthier, have a better time communicating, understanding and getting to know others. Sound like great advantages! (I know, is it correlation or causation...but still...I think it would be cool!)

However, until I heard this woman and her child I did not think about starting to speak with the infant! I have strong emotional ties to Serbo-Croatian - it was the mystery language of my own childhood, spoken when my parents were mad or wanted to keep a secret from me and my sister, the language spoken at parties and by the adults at holiday events. I remember sitting around tables watching everyone speak in another language...I accepted this as just another thing I wasn't allowed to do as a child...but how I wish I could have been included.

I took 4 semesters of both Italian and Serbo-Croatian in college and traveled to both areas in Europe during that time as well. My proficiency, as well as my love for both cultures grew and I love these languages today. So, I am planning to explore these languages with our child - they also happen to be languages of her own ethnic background (Mike's family is Italian, mine is Serbo-Croatian) so it feels natural to teach her both.

But the hard part is how, logistically? As much as I love the languages and have considerable experience speaking, I'm extremely rusty and don't think my vocabulary and conjugations are up to par. I certainly don't want to teach our child how to speak Italian and Serbo-Croatian poorly!

So, I'm reading some articles, reaching out to other moms and gathering info at this stage. One thing many people/articles have said is separating the use of languages with locations/people/times is important - to have distinct delineations of when one language is spoken versus another and not mixing two languages together in one conversation which can lead to the child learning a strange hybrid language.

From the article, Raising Bilingual Children,

Experts stress separating the languages to make language acquisition easier for kids. When kids are learning two languages at the same time parents need to work out language strategies that emphasize boundaries between the languages. For example:

• One parent, one language. Each parent consistently speaks one language while the other parent speaks another language (usually each on speaking his or her native language to the child and possibly the common language to each other).
• Both parents speak one language in the home and a second language is used at school.
• One language is used in the home and at school and the second language is used in the community.
• Both parents speak both languages to the child but separate the languages according to speaking situations or alternate days.

I would love to hear from other parents who are raising multilingual children, their ideas, mistakes to avoid, and resources!