The benefits and pitfalls of multilingual parenting is a subject difficult to embrace.
What do we consider as a maternal language when we are raised bilingual? How does that define our identity?
Many questions and difficulties arise.
As a Spanish-French speaking family, we have chosen the OPOL system to give input to our 19 month old daughter. She was born in Paris and her dominant language is French, having me as her only source of Spanish input.
The great issue has been CONSISTENCY. Sometimes I find myself saying French words because it is easier to use the majority language.
We have the advantage of speaking both languages, so we use the OPOL system with each other as well. But sometimes I realize I can’t remember the correct word in my OWN language, because it is buried under French!!! that's really embarrassing.
According to OPOL fanatics:
Not letting mainstream language words slip into your conversations is the biggest challenge for the OPOL parent who speaks the minority language.
If we switch, it could lead to a mixed language that only a person fluent in both could understand, and that is of course, not the idea of being BILINGUAL.
We DO care about being POLITE so we speak the majority language in front of monolingual people, but this is ONLY exceptional, just to avoid looking like talking behind people's backs.
e.g At the french nursery, I always spoke French to Emma in front of parents and other children, but Spanish when I addressed her in private.
The paradigm shifts now we have to cope with a third language: ENGLISH.
Before moving to England, Emma was able to say some words, most of them in French.
At the beginning she had serious adaptation problems. She totally rejected the new language, getting very upset when listening to people around. She even didn't want to eat.
She attends nursery three times a week and by the end of the first month she started to enjoy it and her behaviour improved.
Now, besides our consistency issue, we face a new majority language which is not our native! We don't speak English at home, we think learning Spanish and French at the same time is already difficult enough for her, and we would want to help her with English but.. How?
We both speak English at a quite good level but as non natives, we don't want to give her an inappropiate input in terms of phonetics or vocabulary in use.
I don't want my child to hear our sometimes accented or grammatically challenged English, even if I consider we are fluent enough.
As a former teacher of English as a foreign language I can notice that after two years in France, my English is quite rusted and even I've found my self saying an English word with French accent or, even worse, mixing (and creating hahaha) words that don't exist at all:
e,g
In class, I said to my teacher the word "amelioration" with an English pronunciation, and then when she asked me what I meant, I discovered I had forgot the English word "improvement' so I have uttered that awful French English accented hybrid hahaha.
Dealing with three languages is very difficult and I don't know how we'll help our daughter to face this challenge, but off we go! aqui vamos! c'est parti!
