Why and How to Raise a Bilingual or a Trilingual Child

My learnings on things that work and things that don’t.

I am an Indian Christian married to an Indian Hindu. My mother tongue is Konkani which I can understand but can’t speak fluently. My husband’s mother tongue is Marathi, which we both understand.

It wasn’t till I started living in the UAE that I realized the power of understanding and speaking multiple languages. Knowing a language like Malayalam or Arabic not just gives you an understanding of what is being said and makes you feel part of the larger group but can also help you gets things done, much quicker. I would love for my child to have that distinct advantage.

Staying away from our home country, we have video calls with our parents very often. Initially, I couldn’t help but notice that my daughter was struggling to respond if she was spoken to in Hindi or Marathi. English was the only language she understood at that time. We didn’t want language to create another barrier between her and her grandparents when physical distance was already a big one. Now Hindi or Marathi isn’t taught at schools in the UAE. That meant we had to take matters in our own hands.

We didn’t really know about the methods available when we started exposing Samaira to multiple languages. We just used our understanding of our family dynamics and resources available to us to come up with a method we thought would work for us.

Approach One : One person speaks to the child in one language (OPOL)

One of the most popular methods of raising bilingual children, this method suggests that one parent speaks one language consistently while the other parent speaks another. We decided to get our Nanny (who spoke Hindi) to speak to Samaira in Hindi while we both spoke to her in English. Samaira started to pick up words and phrases slow and steady. When our nannies changed we enforced the same rule with an even greater emphasis on speaking entirely in Hindi.

This seemed to work very well as Samaria started talking much more in Hindi and stringing entire sentences together. However soon I realized some of my Nanny’s confusion with genders was being fossilized in Samaira. My daughter was speaking Hindi but using the masculine gender : ??? ???? ????? /‘Main nahin aaunga instead of ??? ???? ????? /‘Main nahin aaungi.’ She was also using the informal Tum ( ??? ) instead of the Aap ( ?? ) which is more formal version of the you, that I would have liked her to use. This is where I stepped in. Getting Samaira to unlearn the genders is even more difficult than teaching her something new.

To parents just starting off, my advice would be to choose a parent / family member who is fluent in the language you want your daughter to learn at least with respect to genders and basic grammar.

Approach Two : Speak the minority language at home and let your child learn the other language or languages in school (mL@H).

If you are in UAE, then your child will be taught English and Arabic at school. If it’s India depending on which state you are in, English and your state language will be taught to your child at school. You can then choose to speak your mother tongue or a minority language at home and that will give your child enough time to learn and practice it everyday.

This works when both parents have the same mother tongue or are comfortable speaking the same native language at home. This method clearly wasn’t our choice because speaking only our mother tongue at home didn’t come naturally to us. Also knowing that it would make it difficult for Samaira to catch up on the majority language as compared to her peers in school, we weren’t keen to use it.

Approach three : Use different languages during different times of the day

Another approach is to use one language during a certain time or activity and use another language during another activity. Like English during mealtimes and Hindi during playtime. This isn’t an easy one to follow because it requires an exceptional level of consciousness about time and place and also a great amount of discipline. We tried to follow this but couldn’t stick to it.

We had started off with the OPOL method but later on switched to other methods. As parents we need to try different methods and understand what works for us as a family. Samaira now understands, speaks and is beginning to write in English. She understands Hindi and is beginning to speak confidently in Hindi. My next step would be to start teaching her to read and write in Hindi. She also understands Marathi but cannot speak or write in Marathi yet. From Year 1 onwards she will also be taught Arabic in her school.

Why you should raise a bilingual or trilingual child

There seem to be many benefits of raising children who can speak multiple lanaguages. The Bilingual Edge (King & Mackey, 2009), and articles such as The Power of the Bilingual Brain (TIME Magazine; Kluger, 2013) state that because bilingual children know multiple languages

• it will be easier for them to travel and work in different countries and cultures when they grow up
• it improves communication among extended family members who speak those languages
• it also helps in creating and maintaining emotional bonds with extended families.
• it helps maintain a connection to the family culture & history
• it helps children make friends with people of different backgrounds.
• Studies by Bialystok & Senman, 2004; Goetz, 2003; Kovács, 2009 suggest that bilingual pre-schoolers seem to have somewhat better skills than monolinguals in understanding others’ perspectives, thoughts, desires, and intentions.
• Studies by Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012 suggest that bilinguals appear to perform a little bit better than monolinguals on tasks that involve switching between activities and inhibiting previously learned responses.
• A 2004 study by psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee s helped prove that bilinguals have a stronger executive function than monolinguals. The executive function, a system that the brain uses to plan and solve problems, helps us keep our attention while distractions are present, and it also helps switch our attention back and forth.
• A study published in 2013 in the scientific journal Neurology concluded that among a group of dementia patients, bilinguals developed dementia later in life than monolinguals did.

If you been trying to raise bilingual or trilingual kids and have your own insights and stories to share I’d love to hear from you. For me, this journey has just started and I will continue to share my learnings with other parents as we cover more milestones.

#parenting #parentingadvice #raisingkids #raisingbilingualkids #raisingtrilingualkids #raisingmultilingualkids #expatmom # expatmomindubai #expatparenting #parentsalwayslearning #samiarastories

The original article first appeared on Family Matters on Medium https://medium.com/family-matters-2/why-and-how-to-raise-bilingual-or-a-trilingual-child-c4881328ded1