The other day my little girl did not like what I was doing (I think I was taking something away…), and I suddenly realised her “naiiiii” might well be “nein”. (Sadly, “no” is a word she hears often from me, i.e. in German.)
On the same night I found myself wondering if the oft-repeated syllable “ma” might in certain circumstances not designate me 🙁 but rather the similar sounding “moi”, as in “à moi” (“mine”). The situation would have fit that.
A day or two later, my German neighbour (also a young mother) made a similar remark about the “naiiii” sound, and I gave her my theory when shortly after the “ma” situation came up. She agreed, so I feel confirmed I have two first words on my hands.
Not exactly my pick for first words, but toddlers are toddlers.

I haven’t managed to record either of those just yet, however I got her to “give me four” as I was counting:

quatre

That’s the one number that stuck when her childminder counted with her from one to four in French. I’m not sure how much she understands the counting, but she seems to know that this is what is expected after “1-2-3”, in either language. 🙂

It’s a start.

Some more jargon, fresh from tonight. (Sorry, not very loud, but I had to keep the MP3 player-cum-recording device out of her sight, or she’d have stopped talking and tried to grab it instead.)

In the TED talks series, here is one on language acquisition that shows some quite fascinating findings. Watch it here.

This week I came across an article about a new university study on bilingual babies.

The study, published online Aug. 17 in Journal of Phonetics, is the first to measure brain activity throughout infancy and relate it to language exposure and speaking ability.
[…]
[The study’s observations] suggest[s] that the bilingual brain remains flexible to languages for a longer period of time, possibly because bilingual infants are exposed to a greater variety of speech sounds at home.

Another advantage of multilingual kids?

When our girl was just eight months old, a friend with an older child (also German-French) told me about baby signing and lent me some books and DVDs. I had been sceptical before, thinking it was just the latest fad, but now I read about it, I wanted to give it a try.
The books claimed signing didn’t delay speech, on the contrary, so I thought, what harm could it do?

We started out with four signs: eat, drink, more and all done. However, the only one we really used consequently over the months was “all done”.
Here is what it is supposed to look like according to Baby Signs®:

In July, so after about five months, our little girl started to make hand movements when we were in an “all done” situation, namely when her food bowl was empty, and said “alles alle” (or “fini fini”) and made the sign.
More recently, she has done so prompted only by the situation and the words, without us signing.
And finally, last week, she signed without prompting, to tell me she didn’t want any more water (so her bottle wasn’t empty).
This is what her version of the sign looks like:

(opening and closing both hands)

We are trying her to pick up “eat” and “drink” now, but it’s not easy to remember it all the time. We’ll see.

On the fun side, this is what she does when we say “Oh no!” in either language:

Two days in a row I managed to capture my little girl talking to herself, in what I’m told experts call “jargon”.

Please listen to these two soundbites:

“bap”

talk

And watch her read:

After two weeks of two-on-one (that is, Mommy and Daddy with Baby 24/7 or pretty much so), our baby girl has returned home with many new impressions (such as 17°C North Sea water is very nice, fine dry sand on the beach above however is not), but with very little new expressions.
If pressed, I’d come up with “MMMMM!!!” accompanied by an insistently pointing finger and not much more. Recognisable vocabulary is still restricted to “mama(mam)” and “papa(pa)”, and though there seems to be more babbling or “jargon”, the only other notable syllable, other than the above-mentioned “MMMMM”, is “BAP! which can mean anything at any time.
So yes, she wants to finish that joghurt by herself, and yes, she starts walking, and probably her passive vocabulary has grown too. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, back to life-as-usual 🙁

I’ve often thought about mixing. I don’t mean a young child mixing, I mean a bilingual adult mixing.
The other day I was reading “Mit zwei Sprachen groß werden” by German author Elke Montanari (a book I recommend as an introduction for anyone newly confronted with the subject), and what she had to say got me thinking:

Die meisten Deutschlehrer finden es [das Mischen von Sprachen] schrecklich. Eltern mögen es nicht. Verwandte reagieren besorgt. Viele meinen, wer mischt, beherrsche keine Sprache richtig. Wer ein Wort entleiht, ist faul oder kennt das richtige Wort nicht. Es gibt nur eine Form, die von allen akzeptiert wird: wenn die Sprache gewchselt wird, um sich an jemanden zu wenden, der nur diese versteht.
Wieder spielt die Umgebung eine große Rolle. In Deutschland begreifen sich die meisten Menschen als einsprachig. Mischungen werden als Fehler angesehen, als Reparatur, weil jemand das “richtige” Wort nicht weiß. In mehrsprachigen Gesellschaften ist das anders. 

Most German [first language] teachers find it [mixing of languages] horrible. Parents don’t like it. Relatives react worried. Many people think that those who mix don’t master either language correctly. Those who use a word from another language are lazy or don’t know the right word. There is only one situation that is accepted by all: when you switch to another language to address soomeone who only understands that language.
Again the environment plays an important role. In Germany most people see themselves as monolingual. Mixing is seen as a mistake, as repair because someone doesn’t know the “right” word. This is different in multilingual societies.

(my translation)

This got me thinking because it describes my own private attitude extremely well. I have always aspired to avoid mixing, even with people who share more than one of my languages. The challenge for me was to speak my second and third languages as correctly as possible. The idea was that a monolingual native speaker would not use a word from another language. I saw (and still see) it as “cheating”. For myself, that is.

A few weeks back I met with a friend from Quebec. He is from an anglophone family while his girlfriend is from a francophone family. They are both bilingual and raise their four children bilingual as well. The last time we met we switched back and forth, with me following their lead and replying in the language I’d be addressed in.
This time my monolingual partner was with me, so everyone spoke French. But occasionally my Quebec friends would switch to English for a sentence or two.
When I asked how they did it at home, they said they mixed. Their children went or are going to English primary school, the older ones are in French secondary school. According to their parents (I didn’t hear them talk enough to judge for myself) none of them has a problem with either language, except for the youngest who at six still struggles with some grammar aspects.

Here we are in our monolingual European societies, worrying about “one parent-one language” and avoiding mixing, and in places like Quebec (and many others, but this is the one I’m familiar with), they just live with it.

It’s been a while, and I don’t even have a “mama” or “papa” recording to show for it.

I do have, however, two samples of my baby in a very good and a very bad mood. Plus more babbling.

Listen here:

babble

more babble

unhappy baby

laughing baby
(she’s getting tickled and enjoying every moment :-))

It’s hard to record a baby babbling. Whenever she talks the way you’d like to record her, the recording device (my MP3 player) is not at hand. And even when it is, as soon as she sees it, she shuts up and makes a grab for it.
So I still haven’t managed to record her saying “mama”, nor record her when she babbles with her “other” higher voice.
Here is what I did manage to record recently:

lalala
papa

And here are two longer babbling sequences from today, I apologise for the noise, I didn’t realise it would sound like that when I put the recording on “pause” during her silences:

babble 1
babble 2

Enjoy!

A friend of mine in the U.S. of A. is a professional voice artist. She has also adopted our little girl as her granddaughter and is planning to teach her English long-distance, via the modern means of communication.
To start with, she sent a picture dictionary and an MP3 of her reading it.
A sample: