How do children in multilingual households differentiate between the two (or more) languages they’re being taught?
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As a young boy, I was raised speaking English in the USA, we lived in Cairo Egypt. We spoke Arabic at home with the household staff and I went to a school run by French Nuns.
At that age I had no understanding that I was using three different languages. What I did know is that if the English didn’t work I would try in French or Arabic until I got a response.
I had zero understanding that they were different but I did understand that people might not reply so to try and express myself in a different way.
They don’t, they tend to combine the languages quite a bit, they don’t know they’re learning two languages sometimes they just think people talk differently
When I was a kid I spoke predominantly Language A (moms language, non-native to the place I lived). But as I grew older it switched to the other language. Nowadays I talk to my Mom in B, she responds in A etc. it’s natural literally don’t think about it
My son (4yo) speaks 2, understands 3 languages. Khmer (cambodian) and English he speaks fluently, Norwegian he understands mostly – but doesnt speak. I (his father) dont push Norwegian on him, as we dont live there and there is no use for him to have to know, but I sing lullabies, I speak to him telling I love him and so on, and sometimes when Im angry as well, In Norwegian. So he understands 90% of what Im saying. I test him once in a while by saying “give me the red towel” in Norwegian, and he does.
He never gets confused on who is who in terms of understanding. He never speaks Khmer to me, but usually to his mother. If we are all three together eating dinner ie. its in English. I have no feeling he even thinks about this, it just is..
I think it was a pretty quick realization in pre-k when I realized the other children didn’t speak Chinese.
I am french and my wife is german.
We have 2 sons. My eldest is 5,5 years old and my youngest is 2.
Since he is 1,5 yo my eldest speaks pretty fluently in both language (he’s been diagnosed 3 weeks ago as a child with high potential, he has his first distinguichable words by 11 months old).
When he speaks german and I (when I undestand what he says) answer he calls me back saying he speaks to his mom! (Somehow scolding me).
When my eldest was 4 month old or so, I happened to meet a spanish/french couple and the father told me that children see language as a code. A code with the father and a code with the mother. It totally made sense to me since then.
I think kids can pretty much distinguish between English from our local languages by sound. For example, people here in the Philippines speak multiple languages. We speak Tagalog (aka “Filipino”), English, and other local languages (like Cebuano, Ilocano, etc). Tagalog only has “full” short vowels while English has both “short” and “long” vowels (which Tagalog does not have). Also, Tagalog does not natively have sounds such as f, v, j, q, and z. (I guess it’s trickier to distinguish among local languages since they are closely related, like the many Visayan languages like Cebuano, Hiligaynon, etc.) Since we are multilingual, we also mix languages in sentences (something we call “Taglish” or conversational Filipino).
When they learn more than one word for something, they clue in pretty fast to who they’re supposed to use which word with. My son at only 20 months old knows to ask us for “wuh-wuh” (water), but he asks his uncle for “ah-wah” (agua).
As they get bigger and start talking in full sentences, they naturally group words of the same language together, because they associate those words with the person they’re talking to. If the parents have different native languages, the kid knows to speak one language with mom and the other with dad. When they meet someone new, they’ll ask, “Do they talk like mommy or like daddy?” Or “like teacher?” if that’s where they’re learning English.
I (58M) grew up speaking Plattdeutsch and English at home, High German in church and English in school. I’ll still throw out a phrase or word in either High/Low German in the middle of a conversation in English without realizing it until my wife, kids, or friends shoot me look of “WHAT???”. 😂
They don’t. That’s why pediatricians advise parents to speak one language consistently with their children. For example, if one parent primarily speaks Korean, they should stick to Korean, while the other parent, who consistently speaks English, should maintain that language. It’s amazing to see how even very young children can seamlessly switch between languages, answering one parent in one language and effortlessly switching to another when talking to their other parent.
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