My two-year-old daughter (DD2) is bravely tackling three languages at the same time. I took an inventory of the actual words that she can say in all the three languages when she was 29 months old. Of course, her understanding is much more than what she can vocalize. Frankly, before I took this inventory, I had the absurd thought that she could not speak much, but when I started writing down all that she could actually utter, I was actually baffled by the amount of her vocabulary! At 29 months, her vocabulary is comprised of about 300 words of which 55% is in Turkish, 40% is in Dutch, and 5% is in English.
On average, a 30-month-old monolingual child has a vocabulary somewhere between 300 to 650 words. However, there is greater variation in language development with bi/trilingual children. It’s not uncommon for bi/trilingual children to start speaking much later compared to monolingual children. I guess it must be more time-consuming to digest more than one language at the same time!
Thus, we come to the problematic area of how these children can end up being ‘behind’ in the majority language compared to their monolingual classmates in the classroom—especially in the very beginning, but don’t worry, they DO catch up later and do just as good (and sometimes even better!) than the others.
In fact, recent research shows that the learning capacity of bilingual children is greater compared to monolingual children. This is due to the fact that young children’s brains make more neuronal connections when constantly exposed to more than one language and more neuronal connections means these children can absorb even more material compared to their monolingual peers and with less stress! Our brain is a wondrous device—not at all like a hard drive which can run out of memory at some point, quite the opposite: the more we learn, the more we can learn.
Ironically, even though this research is being conducted by Dutch researchers, it is far from being accepted as a norm in the Netherlands. Here in the Netherlands, the government (through the ‘consultation bureau’, which follows the growth and development of healthy children) encourages parents who speak another language at home to send their children to ‘voorschool’ (sort of a preschool starting at 2.5 years of age) so that these children can learn Dutch by the time they are ready to go to school.
That’s what we did. DD2 goes three days a week for 2.5 hours a day and her Dutch has improved drastically since she started one month ago. In fact, the amount of Dutch words she knows has tripled and almost caught up with her Turkish and she has now switched totally to speaking Dutch and I find myself ‘forcing’ her to speak Turkish to me!
I did a quick search on the web on good tips to raise a trilingual child and here they are:
1. The child needs to be exposed to the language in a natural way.
This means you need to talk to your kid in the language that feels most natural to you. For most people, this is their mother tongue – but then we have the bilingual parents! What language should bilingual parents use to talk to their kid? If it feels natural to speak in both, that’s okay. The important thing to keep in mind is to keep the integrity of both languages, i.e., if you decide to make a sentence in Chinese, don’t include English words in the sentence. Try not to make language soup!
2. OPOL – One Parent One Language
This is one of the popular ‘techniques’ recommended to raise bilingual children for parents who do not share the same mother language. It means each parent sticks to their own language and thus the child grows up naturally in a bilingual home environment. However, each parent has to find other means to supplement the language of their choice, i.e., socialize directly with other people using the same language; watch TV; read; play; visit the country where the language is spoken. You have to give the child another ‘good’ reason (besides yourself!) to speak that language, or else it will be difficult to get her to talk in that language in the long run!
3. ML@H – Minority Language at Home
This is the situation where the minority language is the ‘home’ language – even though it may not be the native language of the parents. The idea is that by creating a ‘home’ language independent of what happens in the outside world, there is greater consistency and clear-cut boundaries with language choice. (Don’t we all parents know the golden rule of consistency—best discipline tool for children, but hard to stick to!!!) A disadvantage of this method is that children learn the language of the ‘majority’ later, which may cause worrying for some parents. For those worrying parents: Keep in mind children are miraculous creatures! As long as the children are exposed to the majority language, they will catch up eventually (usually by the time they are 5). It’s the minority language that you need to worry about, which is in danger of disappearing eventually!
What I observe happening most of the time with children is that the ‘majority’ language becomes dominant after a period of time. How to keep the other languages alive?
- Be strict: Insist on using the language at home.
- Continue to create new experiences using the language: Travel, visit the grandparents, help them mix with the local crowd, find international student exchange programs, etc.
- Make it ‘cool’ to speak the language: Find a celebrity they like, who sings in that language; find stuff/toys only available in the country where the language is spoken.
Last but not the least; remember that children’s language preference tends to shift towards those whom they befriend. Tip for parents: be a ‘friendly’ and strict parent if you want them to speak your language! How to be friendly and strict? I have not found the magic formula yet, but I am working on it! :-)
Helpful links:
Does anyone remember how much they ‘worked’ to learn to speak when they were babies? But I am sure everyone remembers all the ‘work’ that had to be done to acquire a second or third language when they were adults!