When bilinguals get together

APOLOGIES FOR THE LACK OF PARAGRAPHS, FOR SOME REASON I CAN'T GET THE FORMATTING TO WORK TODAY!! A lot has happened in the last few months, my son suddenly will not shut up in three languages! His English has erupted, and although his active Russian is still limited to mainly one word utterances, he is coming out with more and more Russian words and two word combinations when speaking with his dad. For example, he is discovering the possessive ending, and is saying things like "eto mamin/a" (this is mum's). He also claims that I speak only "a little Russian." ("Mama ein bisschen Russisch spricht") Which is upsetting, but true! But he will absolutely not open his mouth around any other Russian speakers! We go to a Russian playgroup once a week, and although he is always really excited about going, he will not say a single word the whole time he is there. However, this was the same at nursery. Last month one of the staff said to me "We have yet to hear his voice!" And just a week later he was chatting away. So I'm curious as to when the breakthrough will happen in Russian. I guess it might take going there for a while. His favourite question these days (in all three languages) is "Whassat?" "was DAS denn?" and in Russian "eto koe?" He insists on calling us "Mummy" and "Daddy" when speaking English, which is causing some upset, especially with his Daddy, but he insists, so what can we do? I tried to tell him that you can also say "Mama" in English, but he said "Mama ist Deutsch". So there you go. Can't argue with that. We had an interesting encounter the other week with my friend's son in Geneva, who is a French/Dutch bilingual. My son started speaking to him in English (This strategy is usually pretty successful in Edinburgh, it's the language that all kids speak!) and my friend's son spoke French (because according to him, that is what all kids speak.) We suggested they try Dutch and German instead, as they might have had more of a chance understanding eachother, but they wouldn't have it. So English and French it was. They seemed to get on well enough, anyway... Loads of friends have approaching me recently about the best "strategies" for raising kids bilingually, and I'm noticing more and more that people are quite stressed out and worried about the prospect of doing things wrong. There seems to be a lot of negative advice around, and although people see the prospect of being multilingual as being really advantageous, they are also concerned about negative effects. Some friends have had advice from parents or educators warning them of not ever mixing their languages, so as not to confuse the child, etc, etc. I think I've pretty much established that all these fears stem from a very monolingual culture, and we should take them with a pinch of salt. I think the best strategy is perhaps to relax about it all a little. As long as there is enough and consistent input in the languages, the rest will come. Kids are pretty amazing.

Hungarian shoes.

My son surprised us this morning, as he was putting his shoes on. He suddenly turned to us and said "Adam, cipő"
(Adam is my father, and Hungarian for shoe is "cipő.")
His input in Hungarian is so minimal, that I wasn't expecting any Hungarian to really register with him at all, but he is clearly picking up some words. Kids are amazing!

He is now using more and more English with my English speaking friends, and Russian words with his dad (inserted into otherwise German two/three word utterances).
"da unten shina" (over there car german/Russian)
Or "train spielen" (train play)

So even though he isn't "speaking" English or Russian, he is inserting appropriate nouns (and some verbs) in the correct contexts. We also found that he repeats words and short utterances in English and Russian a lot more now. It's as if he is suddenly getting active in these two languages.
His first Russian construction was last week, he was looking for his toy rabbit's boat and said "zaichik lotka net" (rabbit boat neg)

So the effort of making sure he is getting input in these three language is proving really worth it now! I know it is hard for a lot of parents who are speaking a minority language to their child when their child is not responding in this language.
But I urge everyone to relax about this. Active production is the very final stage of language acquisition. And when it starts to happen, it's amazing!

And no doubt, there will be phases where he will not want to speak one of his languages anymore. But as long as these languages are around, they remain accessible. My philosophy is that everyone should be allowed to choose whichever language they are most comfortable using. And then we'll see what happens...

Meanwhile I'd better hurry up with my Russian studies, as my son is about to overtake me!

rabbits, pillows and broken O's

My son is very aware of who uses what words, and he's usually pretty good at saying what "Mama/Papa/Lili" says, and
when I ask him what he himself says, he usually picks the German word.

Recently though he has decided, for example, that he says "rabbit" and not "Hase" like Mama and "book" not "Buch"
So English is definitely starting to arrive in our house!

He also stubbornly uses the word "sofa" for "pillow", and he knows that it's called a "Kissen" but he insists that his word for it is "Sofa."
I wonder if he knows he is the only one that does this?

We've been busy, so I haven't had much time to write any posts, but I'll leave you with a short funny anecdote (which is actually not bilingualism related)

The other day, he pointed at a "C" and said "O put" (meaning "O kaputt" i.e. a broken O) and asked me to fix it.

washing machines and other vehicles

Today, my son pointed to the washine machine, and said: "Mama, Auto Tür auf!" (Mama, car door open!)
I didn't know what he was talking about, since he wasn't pointing at any cars. Then his dad, said in Russian,
"No, that's not a car ("mashina") "that's a stiralnaja mashina"

So basically our son had done a back-translation from Russian to German, and decided, since both cars and washing machines are types of "mashina" in Russian, that a washing machine was an "Auto."

Glad we managed to sort out this little misunderstanding ... :)
I am sure there are plenty more to come so keep reading!

My favourite code-switches

So it has been established that code-switching follows rules and is not a sign of confused, undifferentiated language mixing.
It is actually really quite difficult to define the syntactic rules of code-switching, but bilingual speakers have very clear intuitions as to what is grammatical and what is not. (I thought it might be a fun project to write the Syntax of German/English code-switching for example)... But anyway, it's clearly not random mixing, as indeed studies on code-switching also confirm.

Because code-switching is such a very striking feature of early bilingual language production (and indeed all bilingual speakers code-switch when they speak with other bilinguals) this apparent mixing often causes parents of bilingual children some concern that their children are not able to "tell their languages apart." Generally, code-switching is discouraged by parents.

However we know now that language mixing in production does not mean that the child does not differentiate between their languages.

Here is some anecdotal evidence from my son!
For some words, my son can actually tell you what each of us says:
Yesterday, he was holding a spoon, and he said:
"Kindergarten! Boon" (and said with a real Scottish accent!)
I said, yes, and what do you say?
"Löffel"
and Papa?
He had to think a little bit, and then said:
"Loshka"
Then he said: "Thoko auch "boon"" (Thoko also says spoon)

Anyway, here are some of my favourite code-switches from my family:

Habt ihr schon eingefütet? (German/Hungarian)
"Have you already switched the heating on?"

He really honked that one up.( German/English)
"He really messed that one one up- eg er hat das wirklich verhonkt)

Hát hiszen ez lófat! (Hungarian-English) (this one is from some relatives in the US)
"But this is lowfat!" (this one sounds quite rude in Hungarian)

And here is a nice one from a friend:

Sometimes I start a conversation in English y terminó in español (English/Spanish)

I have actually noticed that you can be more or less fluent in code-switching depending on whether you have contexts in which you have other bilinguals to "practise" with. I, for example, am very good at code-switching in Hungarian/German (family context) and German/English (from my school) but I am not very "good" at Hungarian/English. I had a Hungarian friend here in Edinburgh, and I kept code-switching into German when speaking with him, which he found quite funny. He took me up on it and asked me to switch into English instead, because he was having difficulty following me. And I found that really hard! In my life, Hungarian and English just do not mix!! (But I will practise...)

So, over to you: what are your favourite code-switches?

The rules of code-switching

People often remark that bilinguals "mix up their languages" a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as "code-switching." How much mixing happens obviously depends on context, and the highest rates of mixing is when bilinguals talk amongst themselves.

I clearly remember a friend of mine at school (an English speaking school in Germany) saying:

"I had to do a KRASSE UMWEG this morning" (crazy detour)

But codeswitching is not at all random and it actually follows its own grammar. For example, there is just no way that you could say the above sentence with the determiner "a" in German:

eg.
* I had to do EINEN KRASSEN UMWEG this morning

This is just impossible.

Likewise, you could not say
*Heute morgen musste ich A CRAZY DETOUR machen (which is essentially the phrase above in "German")

It would have to be:
"Heute morgen musste ich einen CRAZY DETOUR machen" with the determiner "einen" in German.

Do you German/English bilinguals out there agree??

C is for Dog.

So I have been advised (by my dear brother) that I should include more "cute stories" about my son"s bilingualism, so that my stories become less academic and more digestable for the "casual surfer" (thanks for the tip, A.)
So here is the "cute story" for this week:

We have a book at home for teaching the alphabet to Russian children and my son really likes looking at it with his dad. It has a mascot for every letter, which normally starts with the first letter, or looks like the letter somehow. So the mascot for the letter "C" (which is the Russian "s") is a "собака" (pronounced "sobaka"i.e. a dog.)

Now whenever we are out and about and my son sees a "C" (the other day he got really excited by three Cs at once(!!) on the side of a car of the "City car club") he points to it, gets all excited and says "Hund!!!" (which is German for "dog")

If you didn't know his particular background, you'd really have no chance of understanding where on earth he came up with that particular association!

I thought about saying, well, yes, but no, cos that's actually a "c" and not an "s" because this is Mama's letter and not Papa's letter. But then I dropped that line of arguing and said, yes, that's true, that letter is for dog. Well done!

(I think it is maybe a bit too early to explain that Mama uses different letters from Papa!)