Bilingual children in non bilingual families

Since I started talking about bilingual children in non bilingual families, mostly on my italian blog Bilingue per Gioco, I have been flooded with testimonials from non native speaker parents who are going through this experience. It was really a great surprise, this is a form of bilingualism nobody talks about, there’s absolutely no research done on this and the same people involved are normally not very vocal about it, not until now at least.

I think it would be interesting to share some observations and ideas.

What does it mean to raise bilingual children in non bilingual families?

Basically what happens is that parents,  or other relatives, who don’t define themselves as bilingual because they were raised monolingual, but who now speak a second or more languages, teach these language(s) to their children starting in early infancy. The parents’ proficiency in the second language can vary, so do the methods they use to teach their children the second language. Some parents go as far as speaking only the second language to their children (that’s my case), others make this language parts of their lives through songs, books, games or similar, with varying degrees of systematic approach.

Is this bilingualism?

Well, experts seem to think so. Any frequent early exposure to a second language is bilingualism, even half an hour of daily playing or reading in the second language. The question is whether this will lead to a balanced bilingualism, but as you all know, as parents of bilingual children, balanced bilingualism is more a dream than a fact, and anyway passive bilingualism is very important too and can lead to active bilingualism when the conditions arise (say a trip abroad).

Is it dangerous for the child to be deprived of the parent’s mothertoungue?

That’s more than fair a question. The answer is not known at the moment, because as I said no research has been done on this specific form of bilingualism, hence we can only be guided from common sense and opinions can vary. I have also asked two experts on bilingualism to give their view and they are both supportive, they are Sabine Pirchio from University la Sapienza, Rome, and Antonella Sorace from University of Edimburgh.

I think we should consider two dimensions in which this could potentially affect the child negatively: 1) if s/he doesn’t learn properly the language that should be his mothertongue, 2) if the parent-child relationship is disturbed by the fact that the parent is not comfortable with the language s/he using.

The former risk in most cases doesn’t exist, these children live in their parents’ home country and are surrounded by the native language in many ways, plus normally only one of the parents uses the second language and only in some cases s/he uses always the second language. So for all these children their mothertongue seems to develop normally, from what most parents say (again this is not the result of a research but a consideration).

The second risk, the parent-child relationship being affected, exists in principle if the parent uses only the second language, but we can’t say whether it is a real concern. This would be really an interesting topic for research! What I personally believe, and recommend, is that parents don’t take drastic decisions unless they feel 100% right for them and they feel totally comfortable, and also that they dedicate lot’s of attention to all channels of communication with their children, eye and body language included. In fact on my italian blog we talk a lot about how to communicate with children and self-motivate them, a quest for bilingualism often becomes a journey into a deeper understanding of the child and of parent-child dynamics. I think that parents who are so concerned and sensitive, as well as willing to question and understand everything they do, face a very low risk of anything going wrong.

In any case, the guiding principle should be to do only what feels right, for most families that means finding a regular but confined place in their lives for the second language, with this approach things can’t go wrong, particularly if parents are creative in the tools they use to propose the language and make it fun and enjoyable.

What about accent?

Yes, what about it? I think that the relevance of accent in language learning has been highly overestimated. Don’t get me wrong, if these children had a chance to learn the language from native speakers parents would be crazy to forgo that opportunity, the reality though is that this is seldom a chance. Even when a native speaker teacher can be fund, s/he normally can do one hour a week at most, way too little for children to learn the language, they need exposure, exposure, exposure. On the other side, if they have an understanding of the language from early on, later they’ll be less likely to say no to things like movies in original language (in Italy movies are normally dubbed), summer camps abroad, theater in the second language, holidays, anything is fact that can give them a chance to interact with native speakers and improve their accents. Language competencies are not static, they develop, so these children stand a very good chance to become really fluent in the second language just because they started early on.

The topic is a really interesting a large one, so it is impossible to cover all the aspects now, but I would like to know what the international community thinks about this, and I’ll be happy to come back on this.

Picture by A Journey Round my Skull

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