As a postscriptum to my post of almost a year ago (Jan. 4, 2010), here is another article on newborn babies crying differently according to their mother tongue – or at least the language they heard while in their mother’s womb: BBC article This article on the BBC wesite contains a sound sample where the […]

A few weeks ago, we received a letter from the “Laboratoire des Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistiques” asking if we would let our baby participate in a study about language acquisition. They were looking for babies between 4½ and 5½ months. Last Saturday morning we entered a cramped room on the basement level of my maternity […]

I’m used to being the designated interpreter whenver we’re around my family or my old friends, few of whom speak French. Whether my dad comes visiting, or we stay for Christmas at my mom’s, I’m always glad when I make it through the days without mixing up languages. I don’t mean mixing them up in […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]