Why do parents need a strategy to make sure the children grow up speaking the family languages? After all, kids grow up learning more than one language all over the world all the time. This is of course true. If the circumstances are right, children will naturally grow up learning the languages they hear around them. The trick is knowing what the right circumstances are and being able to intervene if it looks like there is not enough input in a language or a majority language is about to take over. A child should want and need to speak a language, and there should be plenty of opportunities to use it. Parents should feel confident in their ability to pass on their language and believe that it is possible to successfully raise children to speak more than one language.
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Today’s guest writer is Marieke Romano-van den Hoek, a 33-year-old mother-of-two, who blogs at Speaking More Languages, where she shares her family’s experiences of bilingual upbringing. Marieke lives in Holland with her Italian husband and they raise their children...
“We are doing OPOL and I find it impossible to stay consistent in my language use – is my child’s bilingualism doomed?” – this question (or perhaps a less dramatic version of it) often pops up in forums for parents raising bilingual kids. Among the replies you will...
Growing up bilingual is another aspect of my early childhood which was a given for me (last week I wrote about how I took for granted my right to speak my mother tongue at school). I really had no choice, as my mother spoke Finnish with me and my father Swedish. They...
The majority language parent plays an extremely vital part when raising bilingual children. Most post on the topic of bringing up kids to speak more than one language are written with the minority language mum or dad in mind – including the ones on my site. This is of...
For the last four weeks I have written articles on different family language strategies: one parent/person, one language (OPOL), minority language at home (mL@H), time and place (T&P) and two parents, two languages (2P2L) and today’s question is: Do you HAVE to...
In my series on different strategies for raising a bilingual child, I will today introduce an approach, which you may not have heard about: two parents, two languages (2P2L). Previously in this series, I have written about one parent/person, one language (OPOL),...
When raising a bilingual child, it is always good to plan ahead so that everyone is clear about who is going to speak what language in the family when the new baby arrives. This post is the third post in my series of different approaches parents can take if they...
The first post in the series about bilingual family language strategies was about one parent/person, one language or simply OPOL as it is generally known. Now it's the turn of the approach called minority language at home, with the slightly more complicated acronym of...
Like any other “project” in your life, bringing up your son to become bilingual is much more likely to have a successful outcome if you plan ahead. You may ask: “Why do I need a plan? I grew up to become bilingual without anyone making a plan for me!” This is true – I...
Parents in multilingual families face the choice of teaching their child both of their languages from the start or wait with the next language until the first is established and the child is fluent in it. The decision whether to go for one language at a time (also...