Question Dear Rita, Thank you for your wealth of knowledge and great posts! So far bilingual has been easy, since both my husband and I are German and we live in Texas. We both speak our native German with our almost 2-year-old daughter and with each other. She learnt...
Q&A: How to choose between OPOL and mL@H?
Question Hello! My name is Lucia. My American husband and I live in Gijon, a little city in the north of Spain. Right now we are pregnant and we starting thinking which is the best plan to raise our baby bilingually. We have a doubt between two ideas. One, I...
Q&A: How to pass on a minority language when both parents work?
Question Hi, I'm currently pregnant but have started questioning so many things about my kids already. Me and my husband both are from India settled in US. My parents do not understand English and can speak only in native language. I would like my kids to learn and...
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: How to prepare a bilingual toddler for a move to another country?
Question Hello, I'm looking for resources and advice for educating our daughter who is now nearly 7 months old. My husband and I currently live in the USA but will be moving to Germany when our daughter is 1 1/2 years old. I'm a native English speaker (US). My husband...
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: Minority language at home – what happens when the child starts school in the majority language?
Question My husband and I are Russians but currently leave in England. Both of us use Russian at home, and since we have been in UK for over 10 years, we are fluent in English. We have a small baby and wish our baby to speak both languages. We are not going to place...
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...
Q&A: How to cope with multiple languages in a family?
Question My wife and I are having a baby, we are truly excited but we are scared about the language in how to educate our child. We are of different nationalities, Portuguese and Russian, we live in Germany (since one year) and our common language is English (our...
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...





