When discussing the language skills of children in multilingual families, you occasionally come across the situation where a child has learnt to understand a language, but is unable (or unwilling) to speak it. Quite often you will find this described as passive...
When more than one language is spoken in a family, parents in face the choice of whether their child should learn both (or all) languages in parallel or if they should let the child’s skills in one language become established before starting to learn the second (and...
Question Hello, I am Franco-Mexican and my husband is Dutch. We have two daughters and live in the Netherlands. I only speak Spanish to them, my husband only Dutch, and together we speak English. This works perfectly for us, they don't mix up, but... lately my oldest...
Question Hi, I just found this website while I was looking for an answer to my question on how to introduce a third language to our 18 month-old daughter, who has just started talking in the two languages that her father and I speak to her. Your website looks very...
Question Hi I am after some advice. We as a family are bilingual. I am British, my husband is Brazilian and we live in Finland. My 4-year-old daughter has never had a speech delay, if not amazingly speaking earlier than the normal. It’s like she was born to be good...
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...
Question Hi, I am Brazilian and my husband is German. We live in Germany and raise our almost two years old son bilingual. We do OPOL with our son and our common language is mostly German. My husband speaks Portuguese but not so well. At the moment my son attends a...
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...
Question Hi! What do you recommend doing when your bilingual child is refusing to choose the minority language as a subject in High School? My daughter says she can speak it and doesn’t want to start with the basics and would hate the other pupils asking her for...
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...