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.
Question Hello! My husband and I are expecting our first child, a boy, in June. My husband is Scottish, I am German and we live in rural Japan working at an international university. We only moved here last year and cannot really speak Japanese, although we...
Question Hi there, I would like to ask for your advice. My husband is Portuguese and I am Hungarian and we live in England. Our daughter is almost one year old, and we mostly speak to her in English. She does hear conversations in both other languages, when we...
Question Hello, My name is Maria, I am Italian and together with my Libyan husband we have a 10-month-old son. Together we live in Malta, where our son was born. Our common language is English, since I do not understand Arabic and my husband doesn't understand...
Question Hello I'm recently engaged. My fiancé and I are discussing those premarital topics. Child rearing has come up. He only speaks English. My native language is English, but I'm majoring in Spanish. I brought up the fact that I absolutely want to bring up...
Question Hello, I have a kind of complex situation when it comes to picking my child's languages. I grew up in the USA with a family with Frisian/Dutch and Brazilian sides, but only used English growing up aside from infrequent exposures to Portuguese and...
Question Hello I am wondering what strategy to take. I am a native English-speaker who grew up bilingual in English and Assyrian. My husband is German, but speaks English to a native level. I am the stepmother to his lovely 6-year-old (monolingual) German...
Question Hello, I would like to validate our family approach and maybe get some tips to improve on our current strategy. Our little one is 3 years old. We live in Austria and he is already in the kindergarten so picking up his German skills slowly but surely....
Question Hello! We are a Spanish\Catalan family who has lived in China for nearly four years and our child speaks the three languages without no problem as we do OPOL and she goes to a Chinese school. We are planning to move to England in November or so, so we...
Question Hello, We are a Russian couple living in the Czech Republic and bringing up our 11-month-old daughter multilingual. In addition to Russian and Czech languages, we want her to speak English as well. Both of us speak Czech and English fluently and...
Question Hello My wife is Australian, I am Flemish (Dutch-speaking Belgium) and that is also where we live. We are expecting and want our child to be bilingual English-Dutch to pass on both of our cultural identities. Nowadays, since my wife's Dutch has become...