How do children in multilingual households differentiate between the two (or more) languages they’re being taught?
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My son is 4 and frequently throws in Polish words if he can’t remember the English. Unfortunately my Polish is terrible, but his pre-school classmates are now picking up some Polish. Not sure how useful they’ll find it in New Zealand!
it takes a few years for the languages to become separate in your head. you spend a while unable to properly communicate in both languages separately but do just fine if you combine both.
I live in a bilingual (Spanish + English) home. When my first son started talking, he would use a combination of both languages, but this stage didn’t last long. By 18 months he would speak Spanish to me and English to his mom. Since then, differentiating the languages has never been an issue.
My siblings and I speak 4 languages growing up. We switch so often between them I couldn’t begin to tell you how we know what we are saying. Sometimes I respond yo someone in French or Italian thinking I’m speaking English or the other way around.
I lived in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago. It was one of my favorite things to hear the little kids so excited for the ice cream man that they scream out in a mix of Spanish and English just using the word that came to mind first.
As opposed to speaking to a specific person. They learn which language to use.
A long time ago I knew a couple where the wife was french and the husband was American. Both spoke both French and English and they wanted their new daughter to speak both as well.
For them the wife spoke French almost exclusively to the child and when in the house. The Husband spoke English almost exclusively to the child and when in the house. The theory being that the child would associate each language with each parent and realizing that they were distinct languages.
I don’t know how it worked over the long haul, but seems like a decent theory to me.
The Husband did say that his daughter looked at him strange the few times he had to speak French when they were visiting France or some such. So the kid did realize that there was a difference.
Our kid distinguished the two languages we speak at home pretty well (English and Spanish), but sometimes would invent a word in English (Spanish is their first language) that was an anglicization of a Spanish word. It was pretty adorable honestly. A few examples are “colch” for blanket (colcha in Spanish), “stooch” for case (estuche), and “spuma” for foam. All spoken with a perfect American accent.
im multilingual (mum is thai and dad is belgian who speak english to each other) so grew up with 3 languages. apparently when i was younger, and started immediately off with 2 languages, i used to use a mix of thai and dutch. your brain slowly learns that one parent cannot understand specific words because it isnt in their language so you learn to adapt to what your parents understand. my mum taught me my thai and my dad taught me dutch so i guess i learnt which language belongs to who before even knowing what the languages were called. when i was 6 and started learning english, i had already developed the ability to understand that there were different languages. multilingual children grasp the concept of languages much more quickly due to being exposed go more than one
In the United States, many multilingual households use based on pretty specific social settings. For example, I had a co-worker from Germany, and their kids only spoke German to their parents, because there aren’t a lot of German speakers in our area.
One day when we were all out at an arts festival, they ran into an older German couple who, when they learned that the boys had learned German, were very excited to speak with them. The old man spoke a sentence in German, and I thought the boys’ heads were going to explode. The younger one paused, and then started crying loudly.
As far as they knew, only their parents spoke German. They were absolutely shocked to learn that someone else knew this language that, so far as they knew, was some kind of secret communication they had only with their parents.
It was both adorable, and a little bit sad to see them lose this part of their childhood innocence.
So to answer your question more directly, every child is different. The human brain is incredibly adept at recognizing patterns and formulating contextual frameworks. We don’t have to think about forming these connections; they are inherent to the way our brains work.
They know if their parents each speak a different language. In our house, I speak to my son in my language, and my wife speaks in hers. Our son understands both and replies to us in our language. However we do tend to mish-mash the two languages when its convenient, since some words or phrases are easier to say in one language or the other.
But if both parents spoke two languages simultaneously, the two languages might be indistinguishable for a young child.
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