Question Hi Family Language Coaches, Thanks for sharing so many useful tips and resources – I just discovered your website's Q&A section and I really love it! I have a question about raising a trilingual child. I was...
Q&A Choosing the right family language strategy
In this section, you can find Q&As to help you choose your own family language strategy.
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.
Q&A: How to pass on two heritage languages and an additional language to your children
Question Hello! My name is Caroline and I am a native English speaker who has since become nearly fluent in Spanish. My husband is a native Korean speaker who speaks English as his second language. I have been studying Korean and am at an intermediate level....
Q&A: How to prioritise family languages and raise a trilingual child?
Question Hi, I would like some advice about how to raise our daughter speaking multiple languages. She is only five weeks old but I think we should work out what we're doing now. We live in an English-speaking country. I am English but also fluent in Spanish...
Q&A: Should a mL@H family switch strategy to support a child’s school language?
Question Hello, My husband and I live in Chicago and both speak Spanish and English. My native language is English and his is Spanish. We have both spoken to our 19-Month-old daughter in Spanish since birth as we figured that eventually she would inevitably...
Q&A: How to introduce German alongside three other family languages?
Question Dear multilingual parenting team, My name is Wioletta and I am a Pole who has lived in England for 12 years now. My partner is Scottish. We have a 3-month-old daughter to whom I speak exclusively in Polish and he does in English and Scottish. I am...
Q&A: How strict should OPOL-parents be with their languages when speaking to a small child?
Question Good day, Thank you for the good advice on multilingual parenting. I am Dutch and married to a Jordanian (Arabic-speaking). We talk English amongst each other but try to stick with our mother tongues (Dutch and Arabic) when talking to our 15-month-old son. He...
Q&A: How to juggle several languages in the home – what if you move?
Question Hello, congratulations for the excellent website! It's great to hear about the experiences of other multilingual families and be able to get advice from a Family Language Coach, as it is often difficult to decide how to handle this subject. I would...
Q&A: Switching from OPOL to mL@H to maximise the exposure to the minority language?
Question Hi, I am wondering whether it would be helpful to change our approach. My daughter is 23 months old and I've been speaking German with her, while my husband has been speaking English. I am a stay-at-home mom and we are living in Germany, so German is...
Q&A: How to ensure that a trilingual (-to-be) child also picks up parents’ common language?
Question Hi, I have been doing a bit of reading on raising trilingual children, as my husband and I are expecting our first child in January. It seems that in most cases the parents have two individual native languages, and the third being that of the country they...
Q&A: Three family languages – how to pass them all on? What about adding others?
Question Hello! I have a 4-month-old baby boy. I will stay at home with him the first year with a possibility of a few more depending on daycare availability. We live in Quebec, Canada. My native language is Spanish. I'm fluent in English, French, have a basic...