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Finding out you and your partner are expecting a baby throws many discussions that might have once been hypothetical into stark relief. This certainly may be the case if your partner speaks another language beyond the one spoken where you live and that the two of you communicate in.
“I’d like to bring the baby up to speak my language”, they say, and suddenly what seemed a wonderful idea – a bilingual child – might throw up panicked visions of being left out of private jokes and conversations at the dinner table. But growing up with two or more languages can be hugely beneficial for children, and there’s plenty you can do to help out and get involved.
When children acquire a minority language – a language other than the dominant language or languages in the place they live – spoken by one or both parents, they have the key to that culture. It offers the possibility of a deep relationship with extended family and others they might otherwise not be able to talk to at all. You really want to do everything in your power to support your partner and your child in this venture.
Learning something of your partner’s language will effectively solve your problem. You may be able to join a class to learn the language or even just use a language app such as Duolingo to get a head start on vocabulary and basic phrases. This becomes more challenging if the language in question is not a standard variety or is a language not spoken by many people.
If a parent is proficient in a lower-status and higher-status variety of a language – such as Cypriot Greek and standard Greek, or colloquial Singapore English and standard English – it may be tempting to want the child to learn the high-status variety. But the lower-status variety might be the one that the child will need to be able to visit family and feel like an insider. The higher-status variety can be added later if and when your child needs or wants it.
Even if you’re learning a non-standard language, and it takes time to achieve proficiency, you can learn a lot of useful language along with your baby. You just need to understand the gist of a conversation to be able to join in in your own language, and honestly, most conversations with a baby are not difficult to follow.
Even minimal effort towards learning to understand the language is worthwhile for the goodwill it encompasses. Just accepting that your partner will use another language with your child is really enough.
Family language policy
If your partner is speaking their language most of the time with your child, you don’t need to aspire to do that. Your job is to speak the other language.
Together you, your partner and your child will develop a family language policy about who speaks which language to whom. A popular approach is one-person-one-language: you speak your language to your child, your partner speaks theirs to them, and as parents you communicate in any available language, usually what you spoke together before you became parents.
This leads to dinner-table conversations with two or more languages, but children manage this easily. A major advantage of each parent mostly sticking to one language is that it is easier to get into the habit of using the languages, particularly a minority language that might not have had a place in your life as a couple before your baby was born.
The family linguistic repertoire can be said to be partially shared, with your child as the winner of the jackpot, developing skills in at least a couple of the languages spoken by their parents.
Welcoming your partner’s language into your home means that you are preparing the ground for them and their extended family to support your child’s language development.
Grandparents are a powerful resource, especially if they have limited proficiency in the majority language – the language most commonly spoken where you live. They are often very motivated to help your child develop proficiency in their language so that they can have a relationship with them.
Your partner will face challenges, particularly as the child gets older and has more opportunity to hear and use the majority language with other children. It is likely that the child will at some point answer your partner in the majority language. Help them both to persevere with using the minority language.
Encourage your partner and child to make trips without you to environments where the minority language is spoken. You can help your partner create a linguistic landscape in your home: put up alphabet posters, and get books and children’s TV shows and films in their language.
Don’t worry about the majority language – your child has you and the surrounding community to support their majority language development. There is zero risk that your child will end up monolingual in the minority language if they have the opportunity to use the majority language with you and outside the home. Together, you and your partner can give your baby the gift of bilingualism.
Una Cunningham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
