One of the most common questions we get to our panel of Family Language Coaches is from parents thinking about teaching their child a language of which the mother and/or father is not a native speaker, and whether this is a good idea.

My short answer to this question is, “Yes, I think it can be a good idea,” closely followed by “but you need to carefully consider certain aspects before embarking on this task, which may turn out to be much more demanding than you initially think.”

What is your motivation for using a non-native language with your child?

Being bilingual has many advantages, but these need to be weighed up against possible drawbacks of not using a native language – one which you feel comfortable in using in any situation – with your child. Being able to speak more than one language is a great gift, but it cannot be compared to the importance of a close connection between a parent and a child.

If you feel that your relationship with your child is negatively affected by your language choice, would it be better to find another way for your child to learn an additional language? Also, will your child have a chance to speak the language other than with yourself when growing up, and how likely is it to be useful and maintained?

Own fluency

How fluent are you in the language?
If you will be the main source of exposure for this language, your child may end up picking up your accent and possible mistakes. Making sure that your child also interacts as much as possible with native speakers will counterbalance this.

Have you used the language in all areas of life, or for example only professionally or with friends?
Your vocabulary will depend on in which situations you usually speak the language. If you have used it only with friends – do you know the vocabulary if you need to use it in a more formal scenario, and vice versa?

Are you used to speaking the language with a child?
Speaking a language to your child is very different from speaking it with your colleague or another adult. Try it out. How does it feel to use the language with someone who will not answer you for a year or so? Do you know lullabies and nursery rhymes in the language? Would you know the sounds animals make in it? (I always find it funny how different these can be!)

Will you have to work on your own language skills as your child grows older?
You may find it easy to speak the language with your baby – maybe you have spoken it with other people’s children. What about when your child grows up – will you be fine with speaking about school, hobbies and friends later on?

Emotional connection

Language is more than a means of communication; it is an important part of our identity as well as of our relationships with others. Will you feel comfortable to use the language when the time comes to speak about deeper or more difficult issues, for example bullying, anxieties or girl/boyfriend issues? There are ways around this by selecting the apropriate family language strategy, which I will write about in the next part of the series.

Note that once you have started speaking a certain language with a person it is not easy to switch to another. This is especially true with your own child.

Time

Passing on a non-native language to your child will most likely require more time from you than if you were to speak your mother tongue. Will you be able to find the time needed for ensuring enough language exposure for your child, to find resources in the language, to possibly improve your own vocabulary, to visit places where your child can be immersed in the language?

Also, will keeping up with the language require that your child spends more time on it, for example after starting school? Will it impact on other learning?

Expected fluency for your child

The more fluent you want your child to become, the more time you have to be prepared to invest in supporting him or her. Any language skill is a plus, so consider whether it is enough that your child can communicate in the language, or do you want that he or she could attend university in the language?

If you want your child to be able to read and write in the language, will you be able to teach these skills? Note that you do not have to do it all yourself and some things are better left to others who have the necessary skills.

Possible negative effects

Others’ reactions to your decision
Parents are the ones to decide about a child’s languages, and others’ opinions should not really matter. It is however good to be prepared to answer doubts and questions from both relatives and friends and even strangers who may comment on your language choice when they hear you speak with your child.

Will the child be confused by your choice of language?
No, a baby will naturally accept whatever language its parents speak. Children will also not be confused by the use of different languages in the family. Bilingualism does not cause confusion.

Will the child’s development in the other language be delayed?
Depending on how much exposure your child gets to each language, one or the other may be more advanced to start with. If there is enough exposure to both (or all) the languages, by the age of about five bilingual children have normally caught up with their monolingual peers. [more about exposure times later in this series of posts]

There will be two more posts in this series: Family language strategy and Activities.

May the peace and power be with you.

Every single child is lovable and should be loved, just for existing in this world. Today, my list is about the specific lovability factor of bilingual children, as they are my favourite topic:

Create and maintain relationships

The more languages bilingual children know, the wider their network of contacts is. By learning their family languages children can keep an extended family bond going across continents and oceans, and most importantly, from one generation to the next.

Creative with their languages

Bilingual children often creatively make up words, using the knowledge they have of all their languages. It is fascinating to follow their language development as they pick and choose from the languages they know. Initially they may not always know the difference between them, but they soon become skilled code-switchers.

Better at learning languages

With the right support and exposure children are amazing at picking up languages. For example, when a family moves from one country to another, the parents are usually the ones to worry the most about how their kids will cope with a new language. However, the children are the ones that come out on top and learn the quickest and become native-like speakers. And the cheeky little talkers love correcting their mums and dads!

Switch effortlessly from one language to another

It is fascinating to observe a small child switch from speaking one language with one person to talking a different one with the next. This can be really mind-boggling, especially for monolingual adults. I remember with fondness how our lovely neighbour used to give me pocket money for being able to speak both Swedish and Finnish!

Can surprise you with language skills

You should never take for granted that a child cannot understand the language you speak. They may stand quietly next to you in a crowd where you think you speak a language only you and your companion knows – and then loudly comment on something you said! Also, if you are a parent who speaks a “secret” language with your partner, I can inform you that your kid probably understands a lot more of your “secret” communication than you think!

What do you love about your bilingual child?

“Should we drop a language to help our bilingual child do better at school?” is a question parents occasionally ask me when they are concerned about their kids’ educational progress. The answer is a resounding No! Giving up on speaking a home language is not beneficial for children’s success at school – on the contrary, it could lessen your child’s chances to do well.

To substantiate my claim that minority language parents should not drop a language in the false belief that this would be beneficial for their kids’ school progress, I have gathered a list of quotes from research findings, which you can find below (with links to the relevant articles).

1. Ability to focus

“Children fluent in two languages learn better in noisy classrooms than pupils who speak just one, research suggests.” LINK 

“the bilingual experience may help improve selective attention by enhancing the auditory brainstem response. Bilingual students showed a natural ability to determine which sounds were important, and then focus on relevant sounds while discounting the irrelevant.” LINK

2. More likely to complete higher education and earn more

“Analyses show significant effects of bilingualism on […] socioeconomic outcomes: decreasing the odds of dropping out of high school, and increasing occupational status and earnings.” LINK

3. High levels of mental control

“The bilingual children were more advanced than the monolinguals in the solving of experimental problems requiring high levels of control.” LINK

4. Arithmetic, problem-solving and creative thinking

“Our study has found that [bilingualism] can have demonstrable benefits, not only in language but in arithmetic, problem solving and enabling children to think creatively” LINK 

5. Ability to hypothesize in science

“There is a correlation between language learning and students’ ability to hypothesize in science” LINK 

6. Language and vocabulary

“In comparing 9-10 year-old bilinguals to English monolinguals on tasks in English, the bilingual skilled readers scored higher on word-reading and spelling tasks than the monolingual skilled readers” LINK 

“We also assessed the children’s vocabulary, not so much for their knowledge of words as their understanding of them. Again, there was a marked difference in the level of detail and richness in description from the bilingual pupils.”  LINK 

7. Complex spatial tasks

“as well as showing greater proficiency overall, bilinguals were better able to deal with the more complex tasks” and the researchers found “a relationship between some aspects of spatial ability, mental imagery and bilingual language processing.” LINK 

8. Constant brain work-out

“in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. […] It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.”

“[Bilinguals] not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.” LINK 

“We like to make a comparison to weightlifting in the gym,” — “A bilingual has to lift more weight than a monolingual when listening to speech. They’ve been working out like this for their entire lives, so they’ve built up strength for managing two languages— so this makes their brains more efficient.” LINK 

“The answer may lie in the fact that we are constantly using language.  Anything that is hard to do is good for the brain: solving math problems, playing chess, playing music.  But engaging in any of those activities employs language because it requires thought. In effect, if you are bilingual, you are thinking twice.” LINK 

“Multilingualism is probably the most natural form of mental exercise” Dr Thomas Bak

“Brain imaging studies in bilinguals suggest brain centers assigned for language processing are enlarged providing evidence for differential organization of bilingual brains.” LINK

9. Better communicators

Bilingual children learn to take others’ perspective into account at an early age. “Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking.” LINK

“Multilingual exposure, it seems, facilitates the basic skills of interpersonal understanding” so “multilingual children can be better at communication than monolingual children”. “Being raised in an environment in which multiple languages are spoken, rather than being bilingual per se, is the driving factor.” Amazingly, this is an advantage children get just by growing up in a multilingual environment! LINK

10. More tolerant

“… bilingual kids, especially those who learn another language in the preschool years, are more apt to understand that it’s what one learns, rather than what one is born with, that makes up a person’s psychological attributes.” “Everyday experience in one aspect — language learning — can influence children’s beliefs about a wide range of domains, reducing children’s essentialist biases.” LINK

Another language is not an additional burden

“Bilingual acquisition is as natural as monolingual acquisition and that it is not an additional burden for children in comparison to the challenges that children learning one language face.”

“Simultaneous bilinguals, despite the fact that they have approximately half as much exposure to each language as monolinguals, exhibit the same basic developmental patterns and at approximately the same age as monolingual children.”

“Students who have well developed decoding skills in one language can transfer those skills to the other language. Similarly, students with well-developed skills for reading longer material, like stories and academic textbooks, can transfer those skills to another language, provided they know the oral form of that language.”

LINK 

Children with speech and language impairment (SLI)

“… bilingual children with speech-language impairment do not acquire language more slowly than monolingual children with speech- language impairment. Rather, they will show the same patterns of impairment in both languages.”

LINK 

Advantage of the home language

“… maintaining a home language has no adverse effect at all on children’s proficiency in English” on the contrary, “pupils of minority and immigrant background who scored high on the proficiency test for their home language also showed high scores for English proficiency.” LINK 

Instead of dropping a home language, researchers have found that “bilingual children need continuous and regular exposure to both languages to ensure their complete acquisition” and that “discontinues, abrupt changes, and/or irregular exposure should consciously be avoided”

“Parents who do not speak the majority language should be encouraged to continue to use the home language with their children and, in particular, they should be encouraged to use the home language to help their children develop foundation skills related to literacy and academic language competence.”

LINK

Dear parents, please continue speaking your home languages!

Dear educators, please encourage the parents of your pupils to maintain their home languages!

May the peace and power be with you.

Today, as on the 6th of November every year, the “Finland Swedish Heritage Day” is celebrated in my home country. On this day all things to do with the Swedish-speaking part of Finland is brought to attention and appreciated. I am one of the Finns who state Swedish as their mother tongue – so I was born into a minority of five per cent of the population. The Swedish-speaking minority in Finland belongs to the luckier minorities in the world – everything is available in Swedish: from health and child care to public and religious institutions, as well as education on all levels from pre-school to university.

All this meant that my Swedish-speaking father didn’t really have to put in too much effort to ensure I grew up speaking his family language. But this is not the case for most minority language parents who want to pass on their language to their children. As the representative of the minority language you often find yourself worried whether you will have the strength to go through with raising your son to become bilingual. Will you be able to arrange for the appropriate amount of exposure for your language for him? Will he even want to speak your language when he grows older?

What should you do if you are in the middle of it and feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of you? First of all, be proud of yourself – you have made the right decision by choosing to give your son the gift of an additional language. Then speak to your partner and close family. Explain how you feel and discuss the challenges and what you can do together to make the journey easier. Try to pinpoint what exactly makes you feel anxious – by voicing your concerns you will make the challenges easier to tackle.

Make sure to also contact other parents raising bilingual children – find them in your community and on-line. Ask for help – there are plenty of blogs like this one as well as forums where you can find parents who are happy to offer their support and advice.

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the task of bringing up a bilingual child? If yes, what helped you to continue your family’s multilingual journey?

May the peace and power be with you.