Bilingual Family
Bilingual Family is a charity founded on 8.8.2024 with headquarters in Scotland. The founding members were Rita Rosenback alongside former Ambassadors for the successful Erasmus+ Project PEaCH which ran 2019-2021 (see below for more information on PEaCH).
Bilingual Family advises parents and carers of bilingual children, as well as professionals who support multilingual families on how to raise children to speak their heritage languages. Rita is the Chair of the charity.
Bilingual Family extends the PEaCH remit to cover the whole world and children and young people up to the age of 18. All free materials created during the PEaCH project will soon be available on their website, and the Bilingual Family Board and Teams are busy planning new materials and activities.
Bilingual Family Aims
- Help children acquire, develop, and maintain all their languages.
- Provide accurate, research-based information and advice on best practices on how to raise bilingual children at home and in educational settings.
- Advance the understanding of the benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism for children and young people.
- Promote language equality and diversity to give every child the chance to learn and use their heritage language(s) alongside the main language(s) of the community they live in, as stated in UN’s Convention of the Rights of the Child, article 30.
- Advice policymakers on how to achieve language equality and diversity.
Bilingual Family Target Audience
- Bilingual and multilingual families
- Professionals working with bilingual and multilingual families
- Schools and other educational institutions who have bilingual and multilingual children as pupils
- Refugee and immigrant organisations
- Policymakers
Rita’s Finnish company, Multilingual Parenting Ab, the sister company of the UK-based Talkin’ Ltd (trading name multilingualparenting.com) was a partner in the Erasmus+ funded PEaCH Project alongside the University of Ghent in Belgium (project lead) and PMF Research in Italy.
PEaCH stood for “Preserving and promoting Europe’s cultural and linguistic heritage through the empowerment of bilingual children and families” and focused on EU and children under the age of 12.
PEaCH was a two-year project and Rita worked on all aspects of it. She is the co-author of both the guides “How to raise a bilingual child” for parents and “How to support multilingual children” for educators. She also contributed to the storyboards and translations of the videos and coordinated the online collection of language resources, as well as handling much of the social media activities. She was central in arranging the online PEaCH Summit which attracted more than 500 attendees.
Furthermore, Rita oversaw the PEaCH Ambassador Network and coordinated the activities of more than 200 passionate PEaCH Ambassadors who were spreading the PEaCH Project’s positive message about bilingualism across the EU and the world.
The PEaCH project remit has now been taken over by the charity Bilingual Family (see above) who also manages all the materials created during the project.
The Erasmus+ funded PEaCH project created FREE materials for families raising bilingual and multilingual children:
Free handbook for parents in six language versions
English: “How to raise a bilingual child”
French: “Comment éduquer un enfant bilingue”
German: “Wie man ein Kind zweisprachig erzieht“
Italian: “Crescere un bambino bilingue”
Romanian: “Cum să crești un copil bilingv”
Spanish: “¿Cómo criar a un niño bilingüe?”
Informative videos to complement the guide
