A crucial point in a bilingual child’s life is when they start attending nursery or school in the majority language. At this stage, there is a tendency for the school language to take over and become the child’s dominant language. The child may start to use less of the family language and may even stop responding to it. Because this is such an important phase, it is important that parents know how to prepare for it and how to tackle the potential challenges. However, the nursery or school choice can also be a supporting factor for a child’s multilingual language development.
Question Dear all, we are a bilingual family. My husband speaks English to our 3-year-old son, I speak German to him. My husband and I speak English at home, our son speaks German to me and English to my husband. We live in the Netherlands. At daycare our son...
Question Hey there! I am not a parent, just an older sister whose parents are struggling with handling this whole bi-/tri-/quadri-lingual situation. All they ever say is "don't forget Chinese", and it seems like they're dismissing some other important concerns...
Question Hello! Question about 4th language. I am wondering if we made the right decision in sending our 6-year-old into an immersion program where she is introduced into her fourth language. We live in Canada in an English-speaking province within close...
Question Hello, I am from a small town in South Africa where the two dominant languages are English and Afrikaans. I have been English my whole life but married an Afrikaans man. We have a two-year-old who has been exposed to both languages from birth but he...
Question Hi, I have a 4-year-old son. We live in Los Angeles. I'm originally from India and native Hindi speaker. My husband is American and monolingual (English). Since my son's birth I've been on a mission to teach him Hindi. I'm proud to say that he...
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 Hello to all of you! I am Spanish native speaker and my son who is 10 years old – he is also a Spanish native speaker. He was studying in our home country (Panama) from kindergarten until second grade and after that he moved with me to Turkey. At the age of...
Question Hi, I am a first time mom (my baby is 2mo) and both my husband and I are interested in raising our child as multilingual/trilingual. We are both Spanish and living in Ireland, and as per all the reading we have been doing about bilingualism we are speaking...
Question Hi, I was reading your article about bilingualism. I hope you could help me. I'm Filipino and I have an 8-year-old daughter. We talk to her in our language (Tagalog) and of course in English. I would say she has had trouble before with her speech. Even now...