How do children in multilingual households differentiate between the two (or more) languages they’re being taught?
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Sometimes they don’t- I know a young child who has one French speaking parent and one English speaking who regularly combines words and sentences with words/ parts of words from both languages. They get better as they get older
I’m brazilian and my parents are from Taiwan. In other words, I’m taiwanese ethnicity and born in Brazil. Well, that meant that when I went to school or interact with other kids I spoke in portuguese, but my mother tried her best to get us to use Taiwanese and Chinese between us. That was how I knew that I was talking different languages.
Afterwards, we always talk with a mixture between Taiwanese and portuguese. It’s…admittedly, weird lol, and my friends pointed out how funny it was from an outside perspective. For them it was like “*taiwanese words* *taiwanese words* that paper *taiwanese words* There.”
My nephew while he mostly speak portuguese, we do try to teach him some taiwanese words. Back when he was months old, I guess he didn’t know the difference. He still calls my parents grandad and grandma in Taiwanese instead of Portuguese. But once he learned his main language portuguese, he quickly understood that there’s more than one language. Youtube videos helped, since most of them are English based. He also grew up listening to chinese folk music, and understood that it’s a different language, since he corrected his friends whenever they were singing along.
It’s more like they absorb the languages, not that they are taught the languages. Each language has distinct patterns, and humans are really good at recognizing patterns.
Personally, I didn’t find it difficult. I think growing up with the concept that a thing and its words are separate helped me develop abstract wordless thinking. Us kids spoke Swedish with our parents and with each other at home, and Norwegian when with friends. I can still switch effortlessly, though I mostly speak Swedish nowadays as I moved after growing up.
When they’re really young they don’t. They just associate [table] == “mesa”, [cake] == gateau (to give examples) and run with it.
My friends have a ~2 year old who is exposed to Spanish, French, and English and they all come out together in a mish mash. I have another friend with kids exposed to Spanish and English and by the time the older kid was ~4 he knew the difference enough to exclusively respond in Spanish (but understood English). Yet other friends years ago had their children exposed to *5* languages (between themselves, where they lived, and grandparents) and I am just jealous of those kids, but I remember talking with them about how it can take longer for such children to get comfortable speaking fluidly.
It supposedly helps a lot if people speak different languages consistently, i.e. mom speaks English and dad speaks Spanish, rather than both speaking both languages at different times.
Father of a multilingual child (French, Dutch & later English). At the very beginning, they don’t make the difference. They just mix the languages. And if we consider that a 2-year old kid knows 60 words, it will be probably 30 words in one language and 30 OTHER words in the other language. Or it could be a mix of 40 and 20 words. Quite an experience to live.
Only when they start going to school, where only one language is spoken, they start to separate the languages from each other.
There’s a known phase where the kids will scramble the languages together.. by normal language absobtion they instinctively learn the differences but I believe the parents also influence it a lot with how much they might correct the children.
Source: I was raised bilingual and my parents were friends with another couple with kids, they were also a bilingual family but they were less strict in the languages so the kids developed slight accents and were somewhat weaker in the language that was not the main language of their school education. My brother and I had very strict parents so we are perfectly bilingual
Rather than anecdotes I’ll provide you an answer from linguistics :
Imagine you are in a room, and there is a big bucket of legos and two people. And each person starts handing you legos piece by piece. You take each piece and you start just building stuff. You don’t know what you’re building, you just are because you have suddenly realized you love legos.
You build and you build and then at one point you realize, “Hey! These pieces are all for the Lego Titanic set!” So now you go back, and you take the pieces you’ve been given already and you put them all in a pile and you start using the ones for the titanic set only for Titanic. Then you realize, one of those people is only handing you titanic pieces. So any time you get a piece from them, you add it to your Titanic pile.
Then you look at the remaining pieces and you go “Hey! These pieces are all for Lego Millenium Falcon!” And you realize all the pieces from the second person are for Millenium Falcon. Now, every time you get a piece from them you put it in the Millenium Falcon pile. You know all the titanic pieces look certain ways, and all the Millenium Falcon pieces look certain ways, so each time you get one it’s really easy to figure out which pile it goes in.
Like legos, languages follow *really precise* rules. You’re only allowed to put certain sounds together, you can only start with specific sounds, or end with certain sounds, certain types of words *have * to include specific sounds, etc etc. and as we learn a language, linguists theorize we have an internal “grammar” that we attach everything we learn to. Once we get enough rules, we start to figure out what fits and what doesn’t. Children who are exposed to multiple languages build multiple “grammars” and eventually they hit a point where they’ve gotten enough pieces of the language that they realize it needs its own tree. Once they’ve got that, all the new words and rules get assigned to the appropriate tree based off the information that they have.
Our ability to assign information is CRAZY GOOD. This is called **[Poverty of Stimulus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus)**, kids who are definitely not exposed to enough of a language to learn all the rules still figure them out. We are just naturally attuned to figuring out language.
They kind of don’t, to begin with, and then they do. My kids have both gone through phases of only knowing the word for a thing in one language and mixing the languages together. They only seem to fully understand the concept of translating from one to the other when they hit three years old, before that they may well know that we say “red” in English and “coch” in Welsh but they absolutely cannot answer the question “how do we say red in Welsh” until they’re three for some reason.
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