Speaking to Baby in Non-Native Language

lucieanne

Hello everyone,

This could be a pages-long post, but I'll try to keep it short. Basically: I am a native English-speaker with an M.A. in German, have years of experience teaching German, have spent many months living in Germany and Austria, and in general - although I occasionally make mistakes and do have a small accent - speak German well. I've always known in the back of my head that I would start teaching my child German from a very young age, using story books and tapes, etc.

But recently (the last few years) I've come across a community of mamas online who are speaking exclusively to their children in their non-native language, and so their children have become what I call 'artifical bilinguals,' meaning they are fully bilingual but have 'inherited' their parents accent and occasional mistakes.

My husband and I are TTC and we are seriously thinking about jumping aboard that train, using the OPOL (one parent, one language) method. With all the new research pointing to the benefits of bilingualism, and we all know how sponge-like babies' brains are, I think I could regret not doing this for my child. But I have some apprehensions, mostly:

1) Is it right to do this, knowing that the German my child would learn would be 'artificial?' - to which a part of me answers, if he waited to learn a foreign language until school, he would still have imperfect speech in the foreign language. In fact it would be much worse!

2) Knowing that ultimately this decision is up to my husband and I only, I still feel like this whole concept is somehow silly, even pretentious. 

What do you think?

MrsRustyGriswold

I don't think it's any worse than my kids picking up my Valley Girl accent in my first language.

4N6s

Do it!!

vampbride99

I'd say go for it.  My native language is English, but I know a bit of Spanish, and although my husband is perfectly fluent in English, his native language is Spanish.  We plan to speak to our children in both languages starting from a young age.  We would love for them to grow up bi-lingual in the hopes that once they are in school, they are able to learn a 3rd language.

BostonGayGal

Not the same thing but my daughter has gone to a Mandarin immersion daycare since she was 5 months old and speaks Mandarin with no hint of an English accent. The research shows that some children will be slightly delayed learning two languages simultaneously, but as of age 3 my daughter is hitting all her language milestones right on time. There are a few preschoolers at her school who are exposed to 3 languages and who communicate in all three, which blows my mind.

One neat moment we had was when she was @2.5 we were taking the train and she was saying 'hi' to just about everyone. Then as we neared her preschool she heard people speaking Mandarin and immediately switched to saying 'good morning' in Mandarin.

MrsRustyGriswold

I have friends whose 3 yo is learning English as his first language, Spanish from Mommy, and Hungarian from Daddy.  He's doing great!