When a child grows up with three or more languages the challenges can be more pronounced than when only two languages are involved. For example, how to adapt the family language strategy when circumstances change and a third or fourth language is added? The solutions that work well for bilingual families, such as using the one person, one language family language strategy, are not straight-forward to apply if a child grows up in a multilingual environment. Nevertheless, children do grow up to successfully speak three, four, or even more languages. It can be done.
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 Hi! I'm German, my wife is Greek, we live in Greece. Our daughter is 3 1/2 years old. I speak only German to her (and she responds in German). My wife and everybody else speak only Greek to her (and she responds in Greek). My daughter's Greek is...
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, I have been reading your website with interest and hope you can help me in introducing French to my two-year old son. I am half English and half French and fluent in both languages, although my dominant language is English. My husband is Iraqi...
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 Hi all! We are an Italian family of three, our son is now 20 months old. We always speak Italian at home, with me mixing Italian and English. My son attends an Italian nursery school, but is highly exposed to English as we also have an...
Question Hello, My daughter is two years old. We live in Beirut, Lebanon. Our community language is Arabic. Our schools provide education either in English or in French. Some schools teach both English and French languages equally. Since birth, my daughter was...
Question Hi The best way to learn a language? We live in the country (Spain), of course. Well this is our problem: We have a son who is three and a half. He was born in Barcelona. We have lived here for many years. I'm English and his mother is Danish. We both...
Question Hi Rita, Thank you for the lovely pieces of advice. I am Mongolian and my husband is Italian. We have two kids aged four and and two years. We live in the U.K and we always used English at home. My daughters are absolutely great at talking and expressing...