Language skills

So many people ask me what language we speak at home and what language use with Laila. Well Francois and I met in France when I was here to learn French, so we spoke to each other in French. I improved dramatically in a very short space of time!! When we moved to England 5 months later, Francois needed to improve his English, so we considered switching but then worried I would lose my fluency in French through not practising it. We also considered coming up with a compromise such as doing weekdays in French, weekends in English etc, but it just didn't work and to be honest it felt really weird talking to each other in English anyway!
Once Francois started at his job in Bath he spoke English all day at work so he was relieved to be able to speak French at home and that's the way its been for 9 years now.
We are more at ease speaking to each other in English now, we do it if we are with other English family or friends, it would be rude not to! Also Francois' English is excellent now so our conversations don't get interrupted by me correcting him every 5 seconds either!

When we had Laila we tried to find some information on raising a child in a bi-lingual home, but didn't come across much apart from anecdotes really. We have some friends with children who have French fathers and English speaking mothers and have watched them successfully bring their children up bi-lingually, by using the One Parent One Language method. Each parent speaks to their child in their maternel tongue, it's very simple and it works well. It does not confuse the child and they learn 2 languages simultaneously, the language that mummy speaks and the language that daddy speaks. The alternative is one language for the home and one for the community, but I think this would be used more where both parents are of the same nationality but living in a foreign country.

We were often told that bi-lingual children are likely to talk later than children learning just one language, so we were amazed when Laila completely defied this rule! She started uttering her first words at around 8 or 9 months (I'm going to doublecheck this to see if we wrote it down anywhere!), I definitely remember her saying "balloon", well "boon" on her 1st birthday.
Many of Laila's first words were French, in fact by about 13/14 months we made a list of all the words she could say and we got to over 50 and more than half were French words. Some other children of her age were just uttering their first words so we knew the bi-lingualism was certainly not delaying her speech! By 20 months she could count to 10 in English and 5 in French and at the age of 2 she could speak in complete sentences. By this time however, English had taken over French. I suppose its normal for one to become more favoured than the other and as she was at nursery in England and at home with me the rest of the time it makes sense that this is the one she would choose for now. However, this didn't mean she'd stopped learning French. She has always understood French as much as English, her daddy would speak to her in French and she would just reply in English. You could ask her "How does Daddy say ..." and she would tell you the French word for it without hesitation. Of course she didn't know ALL the words, but a lot more than we thought she did!

So of course for moving to France we wondered how she would cope, at least we knew she could understand everyone, but would she be able to converse in French? So far she had only ever uttered single words or very short phrases. We were here for 7 weeks before she started school and as soon as we got here, just through hearing bits of French around her in the supermarkets, at her grandparents with the French cousins etc, she started coming out with things in French which was really cute. By the time she started school we were feeling quite confident that it would only be a matter of weeks before she was speaking fluently.

So after nearly a month of school, I can say we were right. She can and does speak fluently in French, she can use all sorts of complex grammar, speak entire sentences, converse, make jokes etc etc, BUT it turns out she only does this at home!!! I ask her teacher each week if Laila has been speaking in French at school, and the answer is still no! She speaks to the teachers and assistants at least in English! I think her teacher can understand her and replies to her in French.

So Laila is doing her usual trick of practising her new skill at home until she is confident enough to use it anywhere else. She did the exact same thing with walking and talking at nursery, she practised at home first! They used to think I was making it up when I told them she could walk and how many words she was saying at home, as she just didn't do it at nursery! We know now how Laila operates and so can be patient and look forward to hearing about when she starts speaking to her teacher in French and how impressed the teacher will be with her level of language skills!

It will be very interesting to see how Max learns to talk and what his first words will be. I will still be the person he hears the most, actually Laila talks a lot more than I do, so who knows what he'll pick up from her! He is starting to make some sounds and has uttered some that sounded uncannily like "Hi", "Hello" and "Laila"!! Its also going to depend a lot on whether we send him to a nursery or a childminder and how much time he has at home. None of that is decided yet.

I think it's time for me to say Au Revoir, Adieu, Arriverderci, Auf Wiedersen and Good-Bye till next time...