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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Our little girl has very few words she actively uses in both languages. Usually, when she has one word, whether German or French or an onomatopoeia (such as “wauwau” for “dog”), she sticks with that, even if she understands perfectly well when we say “Hund” or “chien”. For some strange reason (and to my obvious […]

Our little girl’s active vocabulary still tends to be mainly French, but when she has a word in one language, she usually sticks with it. The other day, Daddy asked her for the French version of one of her first words in German, namely cheese (Käse/fromage): Daddy: “Tu sais dire fromage?” (Can you say “cheese”?) […]

I was looking forward to this, or rather, I was curious about it. Mixing languages is a stage most bilingual kids go through, and normally it sorts itself out with time, once the child realises there are two different sets of vocabulary and how to use them. Correcting is not recommended, at least not in […]

The other day, at the swimming pool, my little girl didn’t want to get dressed. We were in the communal changing rooms reserved for the baby swimming group, and another child her age came in with his dad. At some point I told her “Guck, der Junge zieht sich auch an.” (“Look, the boy is […]