Inspired sort of by this thread, which I didn’t want to hijack.
Say two people (linguists, for the sake of logic) end up getting married. They both speak, say, three or four languages extremely well (rare, but not unimaginable, no?). Obviously, they’re going to have at least one language in common, which would be primarily what the speak to each other. They have a kid, and both parents speak various languages to the child. Would this somehow adversely effect the mental development of the child?
Not sure if I’m making this very clear. For example, there was a teacher I was familiar with at my high school. He spoke Spanish, English and Portuguese fluently. Say he married someone who was equally fluent in English and German. Their spouse-to-spouse language would be English, but the kid ended up getting a whopping dose of English, Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Any ideas about whether it would have a positive or negative effect on the kid’s language skills in general?
The only thing I can think of (and this happened to a friend of min’e brother) is that young children, around kindergarten age, don’t really grok the concept of “languages.” They think there’s just different words for things, like synonyms. They sprinkle words from non-English languages indiscriminately through their speech and don’t know that other people their age (and their teachers) don’t know what those words mean. Frustration and difficulties in communication result. It’s not permanent, or damaging in the long term. But it is frustrating, for a while, and teachers may consider their English writing and/or speaking abilities “delayed” for their age group.
From all I’ve read, speaking several languages to the child from birth is the best possible thing you can do. Children learn languages innately and have no problem separating different languages spoken by different parents. If each parent speaks a different language, the child will grow up completely fluent in both.
The Berlitz family of language fame did this to their children, BTW, and all of them grew up to be multi-lingual.
I can’t speak to Hello Again’s experience, but the concept of children not understanding different languages violates all my understanding of the subject.
You shouldn’t wait till kindergarten to start speaking the languages, however, but talk to the child from birth as one normally does. And the language practice must continue once the child goes to school. If all the talking as well as the reading and writing instruciton is in one language then the other will suffer, and that’s where the confusion may come in.
Your friend’s brother was an oddity, then, despite what feels right to us. There’s no evidence that multi-lingual children in general have any language delays or mix up words from one language to another as you describe.
For years, it was thought that this was what would occur, and immigrants where discouraged from speaking anything other than Englishat home, so as not to “confuse” the child. But as it actually happens, multi-lingual kids are just fine, and pick up other languages more easily, even as adults.
(Mom used to be an ESL teacher.)
I’m always amazed at how little kids “intuitively” know which language a stranger is likely to understand. One kid I know speaks English, Vietnamese, Polish and Spanish, thanks to a myriad of housekeepers and nannies. Yet the first time he saw me, at 2 years old, he somehow knew English was the right one. With my very anglo-looking latina friend Vikki, he spoke Spanish right away. He’s great to take on shopping trips around Chicago - if he doesn’t know the language, he can muddle his way through many with some pidgin and good guesses - and he’s only 7 now! He’s bewhildered as to why I can’t just “figure it out”.
Lots of kids around here are multi-lingual, and none of them has ever mixed in words accidentally or addressed me with any language other than perfect, unaccented English.
I so wish I’d been brought up like that… but in Anglo small-town Ontario, it just wasn’t going to happen. I’m trying to correct the problem, but it’s jjust not the same…
In my experience (seeing the kids of my Chinese-American friends), this is true but the kids sort it out naturally way before the kindergarten stage. On a recent visit, my friend warned me that her two-year-old was in this “Chinglish” stage where he mixed Chinese and English words without distinction, but her older kid did the same thing at that stage and sorted it out within months without any special coaching. These friends speak English in public and Chinese at home to teach the kids, and the only confusing part for the kids seems to be when they speak English at home to guests.
Well, I suppose that depends on how small a town, how Anglo, and a few other things…
I live in Ontario, and I wasn’t ‘raised multi-lingual’, nor was anyone I know, really, exactly as the OP said. However, my sister, who’s quite good with a few other languages, (french immersion all the way through public school, while I only stuck with it to grade 4 and have forgotten almost all of it, also university linguistics for a year or two, focusing on french and spanish, some dutch classes, and maybe more,) has been, from what I gather, making sure that her kids are exposed to french even earlier.
I don’t think she talks french to them haphazardly or anything, and my brother-in-law doesn’t know much of it at all. Kind of more like talking french is a game that is played at certain times, when they’re young… maybe I’ll ask her about it next time that I’m up there.
Certainly doesn’t seem to have had any negative affect on my neices, especially Emilie, (who’s the apple of her Uncle Chris’ eye )
Things like “Spanglish” are not really the result of children (or adults, for that matter) not knowing that they’re mixing languages. With adults, it’s a way of establishing ingroup connections, or emphasizing common experience. Some children might not realize that everyone they talk to will understand; they probably just are mostly exposed to people who do. As they grow up, each language becomes pretty much differentiated, and mostly native. Sometimes, though, they’ll make errors with cognates. I have many inlaws who speak “Spanglish” when they speak to familiars. But when they speak to people they don’t know, they stick to either one language or the other.
Children (under 12 or so) can pretty much figure out multiple languages effortlessly.
Children have the brains that are the most agile and capable of learning of all humans. They are like little sponges that can learn like nobody’s business. Teaching children multiple langues is extremely beneficial to them, as it allows them much greater opportunities in life, as well as makes them more capable of learning better later in life.
They are not in danger of failing to understand things, or “filling up too fast”, or not being able to communicate Quite the opposite. We should all be so fortunate.
I can only speak anecdotally here, but will say that in our case, when the mother (who speaks a non-English language) spoke to our child in that language primarily, while I (speaking only English) spoke to our child in English, it seemed to cause a lot of delay and confusion, and slow development to some degree (child seems fine otherwise, reading at decent to advanced levels, plays with other kids, etc.). Once we gave it up, development seemed to increase.
I had a friend in college (who was older) who expressed similar issues. The mother spoke Spanish while the father spoke English. They also gave it up. He said something like, “I know that it is supposed to work, and that it is supposed to be a great advantage, but he didn’t seem to pick up either language very well, and seemed someone disoriented with language in general, which improved when we both switched to English.”
I understand this goes against the grain, and may be to factors that are not present in most such situations.
Other factors could be the age of the child, his/her peer group and schooling, as well as the committment of the mother to Spanish in the face of an environment that is otherwise completely Anglophone. Also the relationship the mother has with the child. If the mother did all the scolding (in Spanish), for example, that would set up some psychological obstacles.
I can only speak anecdotally but my kids are both balanced bilinguals in Japanese and English.
The older one (now nearly 9) has NEVER been confused about which language is which, even when he was just crawling at about 9 months old. He would bring English books to me and Japanese books to his Dad - without fail!
He discriminated by racial characteristics - refused to use English with anyone who looked Japanese! A bit hard on a couple of Asian-American friends who didn’t speak any Japaense! That soon resolved itself.
My younger son (5) did have some language delay - he didn’t say anything in any language until he was past three. I was just getting worried and thinking we might need to consult someone (except here in Japan the advice is always to stop speaking English, sigh…) when it all started pouring out of him.
The younger one is less flexible than his older brother in that he gets stuck in one language and finds it hard to switch at will. Also he seems to decide which language to use in a different way from his brother - for him, people in authority get Japanese, as it is his polite “going out” language.
When we went to England this summer he had a frustrating three days when he could NOT stop himself from addressing his grandfather and all the aunts and uncles in Japanese. (Oddly enough he felt at home enough with Granny to use English from the beginning.)
Both my kids will use English sentence structure at home with Japanese nouns sprinkled in. It gets worse the longer we are from a holiday in England. Most of it is our laziness as we all understand what we are wanting to say. They don’t do it to anyone who isn’t bilingual.
As for accents, my sons’ English accents are both absolutely native. (The younger one’s Japanese is also absolutely spot on but the older one tends to English stress rhythms within a Japanse sentence.
I will admit that their reading and writing is not balanced but we live in Japan, and they have Japanese school and Japanese homework, so I don’t push the reading and writing so much - they will get that in school when the English lessons begin in Junior High School.
Both kids are more flexible mentally, more open and friendly than I am, and seem to be able to think their way out of situations in a way that has been fostered by their brains developing along two simultaneous linguistic and cultural tracks. Lucky boys!
It may be helpful to add, in my anecdotal case, that the child’s native language was Austrian German, and the child came to the US at the age of 3 or 4 from a primarily German speaking environment (he was not raised bilingual from birth, although the parents and older sister all spoke English). German, as we know, is a lot more like English, than, say, Japanese is, and shares a certain number of words, perhaps this similar-but-different situation created the confusion.
The older sister, who was around age 9 when the family moved, had an exceptional facility for language.
Being fully able to separate multiple languages is definitely the norm in children. If a child is “mixing up” their languages, it seems more likely to me that the child is code-switching (switching between languages for communicative reasons, which is common in bilingual communities), probably because their parents code-switched as well. If mom and dad switched between languages midsentence or mid-utterance, the kid could just be assuming that code-switching between the two languages is the norm. Since bilingualism is rarely exactly even, the kid could even have had troubles because they didn’t know the word or phrase for a concept that was customarily described in the home with the other language.
But language delays due to confusion between two languages spoken in the home are not the usual event. In one article I read for my sociolinguistics of Spanish in the United States class last semester, children were described as automatically speaking Spanish to those middle-aged and up, since people of that age in their community were often monolingual Spanish-speaking immigrants; they spoke Spanish especially to older women, as women tended to have fewer outside jobs and thus tended to be less apt to acquire English. And if an adult didn’t respond to a request in one language, the kids immediately switched to the other. Even young children have sociolinguistic competence - an understanding of the implications and purpose of speaking a certain way in a certain situation.
It’s become more and more recognized that this sort of skill is an inherent part of linguistic abilities; kids develop the ability to judge which language is appropriate with whom and when.
We forget, living in Western societies where there is a single national language, that in many parts of the world it’s the norm for a community to speak several languages; it’s natural that children should have the ability to manage multiple languages because having multiple languages is a normal part of the human experience.
Another anecdote here. A young lady who grew up in our neighborhood was fluently trilingual before kindergarten. One parent’s first language was German. The other’s was Ukrainian, but both of them spoke English. A grandmother lived with them who spoke only Ukrainian. The German-speaking parent often spoke to the child in that language. The child used to translate for the grandmother. She was in no way confused, she just knew that there were 3 different ways of saying anything.
Although I don’t have kids myself, I’ve seen many children raised in homes with one non-Japanese parent (both here in Japan and abroad) or with both Japanese parents raised abroad and also both non-Japanese parents here in Japan.
It’s a little confusing, so for the following discussion, “native speaker” refers to speakers of the same language as the country of residence. (Americans in America or Japanese speakers in Japan.) “Non-natives” would be American in Japan or Japanese in the US.
Having truly bilingual kids seems to be the exception, rather than the rule. Good results come when both parents are non-natives, so the children are immerged in one language at home and another at school and peers. Even then efforts must be made to keep the children talking to the parents in their language. When the children are allowed to answer back in the “native” language (e.g., English for the case of children of Japanese parents living in America) then the children will understand the parents’ language but not be completely fluent.
As Hokkaido Brit writes, this works for verbal language; but writing is different. For Japanese children raised in the States, there almost has to be special schooling as well to facilitate learning kanji.
Next, having the mother (actually, the primary caregiver) the non-native parent, (e.g. Hokkaido Brit) also is conducive for producing bilingual children. She covers the subject well, and her experiences are similar to others.
When the primary caregiver is the native speaker the children do not do as well, especially if the father also speaks that language to the children. As an American male living in Japan, this happens to be my largest sample size. When the Western father speaks Japanese at the home, in all cases which I’m personally familiar with, then the children just do not learn English very well. Friends have tried using English DVDs and such, but producing truly bilingual children in this type of environment doesn’t seem trivial.
While I get the point of what you are trying to say here, it is wrong to assume that the term “linguist” automatically refers to someone who speaks several languages. “Linguist” just means that the person studies language–not that they actually can speak it. For example, I consider myself a linguist. I am fluent in English (my native language) and French (because I like French and found it very easy to learn.) However, I LOVE to study and learn about the differences between languages. I can converse intelligently about the syntax of German and ASL and Spanish, even though I cannot truly speak those languages. I love Latin and its logic, but NO ONE speaks Latin.
However, one of my real areas of interest is children who are born into cultures with multiple languages, and how their own language skills develop as a result.
It’s important to remember that despite the vast numbers of Americans/Canadians, etc. who have grown up with only one language, there is a significantly larger percentage of the world’s population that grows up speaking more than one language on a daily basis. Most of this population is more fluent in one language than the other(s) to some degree, but multi-lingualism is much more common than North Americans generally believe. African cultures, Chinese cultures, and even European cultures, are more multi-lingual than not, even for kids.
There is evidence that children raised with multiple languages are slower in productive goals than monolingual children are. However, those children are NOT slow in receptive skills, and they generally catch up in production within a year or two (well before school age), and can greatly surpass monolingual peers in their ability to use and manipulate language in the long run.
They also tend to learn relatively early to distinguish one language from the other–although this is the main cause for the delay in productive skills–especially if the languages are used in completely different contexts. For example, if a child grows up with her parents speaking English sometimes and Spanish other times, it takes longer for her to figure out which words and grammar belong to which language. However, if she is used to hearing pretty much only English at home, while Spanish is used at Grandma’s house, she will learn to differentiate them more readily.
My husband and I are both American. We both also speak French. However, his French is not terribly good, so I have been very hesitant to try to raise our kids with his version of French. However, we have tried to make sure that our children are exposed to a wide variety of languages (French, German, Spanish, ASL, Japanese) if only so that they are more open to learning other languages as they come across them. This has worked well for our daughter–who has gone a long way in teaching herself Swahili, Japanese, and ASL, and who just started high school French classes this year. However, our son has had a lot of problems just learning English. This doesn’t mean that he could not learn a second language–just that because of the fact that he lives in the US, there really isn’t much incentive to push him into learning a second language right now.
First is that if the primary caregiver speaks the “weaker” language, (in my case, English in Japan) then the kid has much more exposure and the chances of becoming a balanced bilingual are higher. Secondly it is important that the other family members at least understand the second language, and it is preferable that they speak it.
There is also the issue of how the second language is viewed within the family and also in the society at large. For example, a lot of my non English speaking foreign aquaintances (Phillipine, Chinese, Korean) have told me that their language is regarded, particularly by in-laws, and in some cases by the husbands, and in SOME cases, even by the women themselves, as disadvantageous to the kid, or at the very least no gain, and they are discouraged passively or actively from using their own language with the kids. Kids also feel atmospheres very quickly and will sense non-approval when the non-popular language is used.
The final thing is that raising a kid bilingual is indeed not a trivial thing! In some ways it comes naturally but you do have to work at it. I talk and talk and talk to my kids, all the time, about everything. We read a lot of books and listen to a lot more on tape and CD. And half of our TV is English based (getting less as the kids get more into the peer group thing.)
There is also some cultural resistance from single-language societies like Japan, the UK and the US to using another language. Even my mother, who thinks what we are doing with the kids is great, will accuse me of “showing off” when we speak Japanese in public in England. And if there’s ever a health or social welfare type problem - well, shed the English is the first advice I have had from doctors and social workers. Grrrr. Some of my friends have caved to these types of pressures and now cannot talk to their kids in their own language. It is heartbreaking and a real waste.
The other mistake is to listen to the people who suggest that you wait till the kid is say in Kindergarten and has established their first language before beginning on the next one. That is stupid and doomed to failure - do you really think you could suddenly, overnight, begin talking to and interacting with your kid in a totally different way? It would be like deciding to give them a new name! Impossible!
May I share my experience? I don’t think speaking different languages to a child is harmful at all. I came to Australia from China at the age of 4 and my parents, like other immigrant parents, were told to speak English to me at home. But my parents decided not to do that because my mum didn’t know any English and it would suck for me to not be able to communicate with her. A lot of Chinese parents did stop speaking Chinese to their kids and now they can’t speak the language at all. My own parents gave up teaching me to read and write after a few years so I’m now pretty much illiterate in Chinese but I still speak fluently. My English skills turned out just as good, if not better than the kids who were spoken to in Chinese and I think my familiarity with Chinese has helped me a lot with my French in a roundabout sort of way. Knowing two vastly different languages has made it easier for me to accept new sounds, pronunciations, sentence constructions and just the general “feel” of a language. I find this is the case with most of my Chinese-speaking Chinese friends as well. I don’t think exposure to different languages will set kids back but instead give them a nice advantage.
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