Does baby language count as a language? I mean the sort consisting of fixed words (such as “wauwau” for “dog”) that are not real words yet are used os consistently that parents and other regular care-takers will understand them as if they were. In that case, our daughter is making trilingual sentences. “Wauwau pas da?” […]

I recently interviewed a multilingual friend who is originally from Spain but grew up in the Brussels area where she still lives now. She arrived there as a young child in a Catalan-only speaking family and would go back to Spain to visit family several times (including summer holidays) each year. With her parents and […]

My little girl is into making sentences these days. They are somewhat lacking articles and prepositions, but you get the idea. Although they are generally in French, German words are being used. A popular expression is “That’s my…” “C’est ma Kuh !” (German, cow, female.) “C’est ma lapin !” (French, bunny, male.) “C’est ma coussin […]

I had hoped that our Christmas holiday with my monolingual mom would yield some results in term of active German vocabulary, but not even the day spent with my friend and her two daughters (almost 6 and almost 2, the former very talkative) did. Then two days ago, our also-almost-six-year-old bilingual neighbour came over, and […]

Wir waren heute mit dem Auto in der Stadt, als plötzlich von hinten der Ausruf kam: “Avance, c’est grün!” Obwohl sie alles versteht, was ich ihr sage, ist ihr aktives Vokabular überwiegend Französisch. Aber Rolf Zuckowskis Lied “Rotes Licht und grün” scheint bei ihr doch hängen geblieben zu sein 🙂 Apropos “doch”: Neben “ja” und […]

As I mentioned recently, French is becoming the dominant language in my girl’s active vocabulary. Being the bilingualism-obsessed mother that I am, I’ll let you imagine the joy with which I greet exclamations such as the one today in the car: “Papa, c’est grün!” As an aside, this is her mother’s daughter. In my own […]

If the number of French words and the almost exclusively French phrases I hear from my daughter (29 months) these days weren’t enough, French is now also taking over her German words. She still says “kä” when she refers to cheese with us, but the nanny has reported her to say “fromage” when “kä” didn’t […]

The obvious answer is yes. In a recent study of monolingual French infants aged 20 months, researchers introduced them to new words in a foreign language in an attempt to find out if and how easily they would assimilate them. They came to the conclusion that the results obtained in the study show that 20-months-old […]

L’émission On est faits pour s’entendre, sur RTL, avait invité, le 02 octobre 2012, Barbara Abdelilah-Bauer, fondatrice du Café Bilingue et généralement spécialiste dans la matière du bilinguisme, pour une discussion sur les enfants bilingues. Pour l’instant, l’émission qui dure 35 minutes est encore disponible sur le site de RTL ici. (Si le lien ne […]

Parfois ce sont les petites choses qui font sourire. Deux situations récentes : Ce soir, en fin de repas Mama : “Willst du Käse?” (Tu veux du fromage?) Notre fille (28 mois) : “Non, pas kä!” Elle court au frigo, visant le camembert. Papa : “Tu sais, le truc rond [la boîte de camembert], c’est […]