Question Hello! Thanks for the website! I am starting to check it out to make our daughter, multilingual like us! My wife and I are native Spanish speakers, we are living in Brazil right now, so we also know how to speak Portuguese and our third languages differ from...
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...
One parent, one language – OPOL is dead, long live OPOL!
Which strategy should you use to raise your bilingual child? Ask the question and you can be forgiven for getting all confused with the different viewpoints you are offered both by experts and other parents. Today I will take a closer look at the best-known of the...
Q&A: Passing on a non-native language to a child
Question I stumbled across this website and found it extremely helpful and interesting. I tried to surf through some of the questions and recent posts but my situation does not seem to be covered. My wife and I are talking about trying to have children in the next few...
Q&A: Bilingual child minders speaking more than one language – good or bad?
Question Hi, I'm a Spanish-speaking mother married to a German speaker, living in Germany. Each of us uses our native language when interacting with our 4-month daughter - basically: one parent one language. I am now looking at kindergartens for my daughter to go to...
Q&A: Choice of language with a bilingual child when others are around
Question We live in Israel, and I am from Mexico, my husband speaks only Hebrew with our 3-year-old boy, and I speak only Spanish, from my side he does not hear a Hebrew word. We were just in Mexico and his Spanish is now till the moon - I am so glad that he developed...
Q&A: The trilingual family
Question My children are learning three languages, because my husband is English, he, of course, speaks English to them; I am Mexican and speak Spanish, and we live in Italy. I only speak Spanish to them, but only speak English to my husband. They go to childcare, and...
Q&A: When using OPOL can parents read books in both languages
Question I come from Italy and my husband is German. We live in Germany. Our son is almost 1 year old and I only speak to him in Italian. The question I would like to ask is as I am likely the one who is reading to him, is it ok for me to read to him in German as well...
How to pass on a minority language to a child in a bilingual family
The number of parents who raise their children in a multilingual environment is increasing. More and more individuals and whole families move from one country to another due to work, studies or other reasons. Couples with different native languages meet and start a...
Q&A: Which language should I speak to our bilingual son?
Question We want our son to be at least bilingual Spanish/English and hopefully have a good command of French too. I look after my son full time since my wife works during the day. So I am desperately trying to work out the best way to approach making sure our son...


