On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about language. Being American-Peruvian married to a German means that any one of three languages are spoken at any given time so what will my child speak?…. let’s talk about it.
Hallöchen, Lieblings. I’m Mari, a sci/fi and fantasy author, who has been living in southern Germany since 2014.
When my parents first got married in the early 80s, one of the big topics of conversation they had was on how to raise their future children….well, child as I am the only product of that marriage. They had agreed that they would not hold a culture as superior to the other – my mom is Peruvian, my dad is American – so they wanted their children to grow up with both and have pride in both.
That also extended to language.
My mom spoke to me in Spanish and my Dad in English from day 1. My first language was Spanglish. My relatives still talk about how I was hella cute as a child but couldn’t understand what I was saying because it was a mix of English and Spanish. My first word was “Tom” as in Chupon or pacifier.
When I was seven and started learning to read in English, my mom pulled out her Coquito book and had me start learning how to read in Spanish. I was also doing Hooked on Phonics as well because my dad was actually worried that I would pick up my mom’s accent while learning to read in English and my mom read to me every night.
I remember hated doing all of that. I didn’t want homework….I wanted to play….but looking back, my parents did the right thing. I looooooove to read and while it took awhile with Spanish, because I was a stubborn little shit. I am fluent now in it, my college degree is in Spanish…and biology….well, technically my Spanish is rusty since I don’t get to use it often here in Germany, but I do keep up with is because I have relatives even in the States who don’t really speak English.
As a result, my kid will have to learn all three languages. At the moment, we’re doing what my parents did: one parent, one language. I speak English, my husband speaks Hohenlohisch….cause let’s face it, he’s not speaking High German….
We also video chat with my parents everyday and my mom speaks Spanish and my dad English. Maus also gets alone time with her Oma almost every day as well and gets more exposure to her father’s dialect. She will learn High German in school like the other kids in the area as well as some English. She will get more from me just like I had my mom add to my Spanish education when I studied in school.
Once she’s had a better grasp with English and German, then I will dive into Spanish….and by that I mean right before she starts grade school or when she does so like 5, 6, or 7. Or maybe even before when I figure out a fun game with Spanish. We’ll see.
The reason why I want to wait on Spanish is because one language, one parent, requires consistency. I can’t switch between Spanish and English. I mean, do kind of throw some Spanish in there. I interchange asking her if she wants booby or teta or that I’m going to change her diaper or pañal or even her Windel, but I still mostly speak English to her.
It is quite common that kids from multilingual households do delay in speech but only because their brains are organizing multiple languages at once so I don’t know when Maus will start speaking and I’m prepared if it takes longer. That’s okay.
One of my cousins who’s half-Peruvian, half-German is married to a French guy. I remember with her first daughter, she was worried about a delay but the child had a mother who spoke German, a Father who spoke French, a Peruvian nanny, and they live in Amsterdam. Her brain just needed more time to organize everything. They have three kids now and all are fine and multilingual.
I have seen in other expat/immigrant videos where parents are also doing one parent, one language and the comment section is filled with people giving misguided advice that they should only speak one language to their child and I’m here to tell you that the science doesn’t agree with you. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t speak multiple languages to your child from the get go. Studies have shown that infants are sensitive to these differences as well as a languages rhythm from birth on for example English vs French (Byers-Heinlein, Burns, & Werker, 2010; Mehler et al., 1988). They can even tell the difference between rhythmically similar languages like French and Spanish starting at 4 months (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997, 2001; Nazzi, 2000). Recent research has shown that 4-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants can discriminate silent talking faces speaking different languages (Weikum et al., 2007) Further studies have shown that by 8 months, monolingual children stop paying attention to facial recognition while bilingual children are still sensitive to lingual differences.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6168212/
Maus’s brain is an amazing thing and I’m going to give her whatever advantage I can.
What do you think? What are your thoughts on all of this? If you were in my position, what would you do? I would say there is no wrong answer, but saying that I should only speak to my kid in one language (and that language be German because I’m in Germany) is a wrong answer in my opinion. I think it would be a disservice to my child to learn bad habits from my not perfect German when she will learn how to do that fine in school, she will learn better English from me as well as Spanish. It’s how I was raised and I turned out more than fine.
But I would love to know your thoughts. Let me know in the comments below!
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And that’s it. Until next time. Adee.
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