A cousin of mine, who grew up in the US with her mother speaking German, spent a school year with her grandparents in Germany, going to German junior high school (she was 10). She’s now perfectly bilingual. One of my friends was born of French parents in Paris but raised in the US, her mother […]

I came across this article today (though it’s two years old, almost to the day), which I found very interesting: A split in linguistic personalities I am not sure what to say about that myself. Do I behave differently in German than in English or in French? I’m scratching my head, trying to come up […]

Here we are. The baby is there, as you no doubt know, and she is being talked to. With all the good advice from the books (see biblio section) in mind, my first word to her was in German. (No, I won’t tell what it was, that’s just between the two of us.) I also […]

The big day approaches, and when I’m not busy preparing the practical part, or trying to catch up on sleep, I can’t help asking myself how this big change in our lives will affect us on a linguistic level. The plan is to apply the very basic one-parent-one-language formula. This means Mommy will speak German […]

Given names The significance of names has changed over the ages. In Ancient Rome, so I have read, they stopped bothering about first names for girls at some point. In Eastern Frisia, my granny’s home, children would receive the same names over and over again from generation to generation, and if in those big families […]

Il y a quelques semaines, j’ai lu des articles de différentes sources sur une étude disant que dès la naissance, les bébés pleurent dans la langue de leur mère (leur mère étant la personne qu’ils entendent constamment dès qu’ils peuvent entendre). L’étude comparait en particulier des bébé allemands et français, puisque la différences entre les […]

Vor ein paar Wochen las ich an verschiedenen Stellen über eine Studie, derzufolge Babies schon ab der Geburt in der Sprache ihrer Mutter (die Mutter ist die Person, die sie ständig hören, sobald sie hören können) schreien. Schreien? Die Studie verglich vor allem deutsche und französische Babies, weil der Unterschied zwischen der jeweiligen Satzmelodie sehr […]

A few weeks ago, via various sources, I came across a study that said already at birth, babies cry in their mother’s language (their mother being the one person they will always hear, once they can hear). The study compared German and French babies in particular since the difference is so obvious in the spoken […]