Question Hello, I wonder about minority language (mL) between parents combined with one parent, one language (OPOL), and the benefits of having spoken/understood several languages during childhood without making it to even receptive bilingualism. We are young...
Q&A: How to adjust the family language strategy when a trilingual child’s majority language changes?
Question Hello, I am Mari, I am Italian and I live in Finland with my Finnish husband and our 10 months old daughter. My husband and I met in the UK where we lived for about 10 years until we moved to Finland 2 years ago. We have been always communicating in English...
Q&A: Should we change our family language strategy from OPOL to mL@H?
Question Hi, I currently live and work in China. I am from Australia and English is my mother tongue. My wife is Chinese. We have a 19-month-old son, Daniel. When it came to deciding which approach to choose in order to raise Daniel as bilingual, OPOL seemed to be the...
Q&A: Should we switch our family language strategy to support the minority language?
Question Hi, My wife and I have so far adopted the OPOL strategy. Her native language is English, mine is Dutch, which is the majority language since we live in the Netherlands. Our two children have a clear preference for Dutch. They understand English perfectly...
Q&A: How to adapt the family language strategy when the minority language changes?
Question Hi, I follow your blog and have found your advice extremely helpful in bringing up my daughter as a bilingual child. A little background, my husband and I are both perfectly fluent in English and Spanish both verbally and written and in professional and...
Q&A: Should we choose the majority language or a third one as our family language?
Question Hello, We are Czech-Finnish couple living for 3 years in Finland and we just got our first child. We tried to agree on our family-language-strategy before our son was born, but we couldn´t agree on one. What was sure was, that each one of us wants to speak to...
Family language strategy – a must-have for raising bilingual children?
For the last four weeks I have written articles on different family language strategies: one parent/person, one language (OPOL), minority language at home (mL@H), time and place (T&P) and two parents, two languages (2P2L) and today’s question is: Do you HAVE to...
Two parents, two languages – 2P2L, double the benefits of OPOL?
In my series on different strategies for raising a bilingual child, I will today introduce an approach, which you may not have heard about: two parents, two languages (2P2L). Previously in this series, I have written about one parent/person, one language (OPOL),...
Minority language at home – mL@H: use it if you can!
The first post in the series about bilingual family language strategies was about one parent/person, one language or simply OPOL as it is generally known. Now it's the turn of the approach called minority language at home, with the slightly more complicated acronym of...






