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Too many languages
hi all,
Perhaps some other parents can help me here
I am in an international marriage. I am making up the nationalities for example's sake and not to get recognized, but suffice to say, close enough ;-)
My wife is Polish. I am Norwegian. We talk together in English
My wife speaks Polish to our child(toddler, just on the verge to talk) and she is often exposed to Polish from family visits. I speak Norwegian. At the crèche the language is French
Now for me, it's not a big deal if my child ends up not speaking Norwegian as I don't have much family left in Norway. Polish is fine as my wife has a big family that don't speak English.
My concern is the following. As our child is constantly exposed to French I am afraid I am going to end up not being able to properly communicate with her and have to talk to her in French. Nothing against French, but it is not my language or culture - Dutch would have been better. My French is let's say, 50%. I can manage rudimentary tasks and with more practice and exposure I could certainly bring up that level, but to be honest I prefer not to have to speak French to my child as she grows up. Norwegian would be the best as it seems the most natural to me - after all it's my language and the language I think in, but she is not exposed very much to it so I am afraid it won't stick. Already she understands Polish and French much better.
If we end up speaking English(child and me), that's perfectly fine, but I am afraid our child won't be able to master English until say she is around 10 years. What do we do in the meantime?
Have anybody here been in a similar situation, what was the outcome?
Thank you for your feedback
Multilingual children have an amazing ability just always speak to your child in your own language they will simply lean the three don't worry about other languages being exposed at a young age rewrites the brain and language learning is usually not something hard for the, it's only us adults who struggle
"My wife speaks Polish to our child(toddler, just on the verge to talk) and she is often exposed to Polish from family visits. I speak Norwegian. At the crèche the language is French"
Good. Keep it like that. Change to Dutch when it's time for school if needed (I wouldn't), but be totally consistent with the Polish and Norwegian. At least until early teens.
Never address the child in English - either of you.
Do not worry at all if the languages develop at different speeds or the child is a late speaker or confuses languages and mixes words.
As things are, you should end up with a child fluent in Polish and French, with good Norwegian, and probably good English and Dutch picked up on the way.
Agree totally with the other two posters above. Speak to your child in your mother tongue. The different languages will probably develop at different speeds, depending on how much contact the child has with each, but that's no problem.
The most important thing is that you don't make it into an issue for the child. We only ever spoke English to our children, but sometimes after a long day at primary school, they'd come home and still babble away in French, and that was fine, I just replied in English. We never "forced" our kids to speak one or the other, they just naturally learned the languages.
I grew up speaking English and French at home; I learned Spanish in school. My parents spoke to us in either English or French with no particular plan. I'm trilingual. Don't overthink this.
I think as long as you're consistent with the languages, the child will adapt to whatever situation.
I'd also strongly advocate you speaking to the child in your mother tongue - I grew up with a parent who didn't and sometimes I do feel as though there were some things they weren't entirely 100% comfortable expressing. Don't underestimate that some things you will want/need to say to your child in your own language.
Again, the child won't have an issue with it unless you do ;)
I can only endorse what previous posters have said with my own experience.
My son has a French wife and they always use their own language to speak to their kids. Their eldest appreciated that Grandpa (me) spoke only English to her whilst Grandmere (her mum's mum) spoke only French to her so she clearly understood that there were two languages. However it was only when she started school that they realised that she had not grasped the fact that the same applied to her parents. She automatically spoke French to her mum and English to Dad but didn't realise that she was doing so.
When I moved here, I started to study Dutch. In my class was a lady who was taking Dutch because her family had decided that it was time that they had at least ONE language which all four of them spoke. Until then they had managed to get to the stage of having 2 teenagers but no common language. Like you, the parents spoke their mother tongue to the kids and English to each other and they had no problems.
If you speak to your child in 'Norwegian' consistently, for them that will become the natural way of speaking to you and they will probably do it automatically for the rest of their life. People adapt the way they speak depending on their specific interlocutor without even thinking about it. Don't worry too much about it. Just make sure to speak your language consistently, read to them often, maybe expose them to Norwegian television, etc.
If you would prefer it if your child went to a Dutch-language crèche or school due to linguistic or cultural affinity (I assume you speak a Germanic language), what is stopping you? I don't understand why you use the conditional tense, unless perhaps you live in Wallonia where the option doesn't exist.
My kids have been raised tri-lingual: Dutch (my native language), English (their dad's native language) and French (school and environment language for the first 12 years of their life). They are now young adults. Go to a Flemish university. And are fluent in the three languages. A child learns as many languages as spoken too BUT the same person must speak the same language all the time. So you can't decide to speak one language one day, and a different one the next day. They might at one point start answering you in the language they are most comfortable with. Just continue talking your own language :D Relax, all will be fine! Though it will take longer than with kids raised in one language only. But those kids only speak one language ;)
