London shares with Paris the fact that:
a) I lived there for a few years
b) and there are friends to visit!
This domestic feeling brings nice let’s prepare dinner together activities rather than lonely meals in ubiquitous hotel rooms with ubiquitous CNN background after a day full of meetings in sub-zero air conditioned (ubiquitous) HQs.
The theme of the evening during my London diner chez des amis was: Which language should you speak with the kids at home when you are living abroad?
In as much as I am a fervent multikulti supporter of bi-tri-linguism in the family, I do agree with my friend AD. Your mother tongue (or the mother’s language, as in this case) should be spoken in the house. The kid will have plenty of occasions to learn proper English, be it at the Tagesmutter/childminder’s, with the nanny or at the crèche. But a casa, parents mother tongue!
For this reason, my friend has been looking for a fille au pair francophone right when the baby started putting together the first words. But with limited domestic/pedagogic success so far. Apparently in the London child care market the best nannies and au pair are from Eastern Europe. Extremely professional with things babies, full of diplomas, trained in premier secours and with lots pragmatic common sense so useful in the domestic universe but ne parlant pas français.
Hence the London dilemma: is it better to employ a 20-something teenager speaking en bon français who may end up to be one more person to look after, or a dependable Deputy Mum that you can trust but with a hard English accent?
One of the nicest memories I have in visiting friends who live abroad is seeing my friend’s O. little son, born in Moscow, play hide and seek with the energetic and fun Russian nanny and singing russian songs that his 2 elder sisters hadn’t learnt! And at dinner time, the 3 of them would prove a real terremoto around the table but it was incredible to see how they would effortlessy switch from French to English and Russian. It’s incredible how fast kids absorbe languages.
But all the multikulti success stories share the same pattern: in the family environment it is very clear to the kid WHO speaks which language. And it’s easier when there is an extended family around. In my family only Italian or Italian dialects were spoken, outside the family Slovene as we were Italian minority, but my grand parents spoke Friulano (Eastern Ladin) and it got under my skin without needing to study a single word in a formal way. That was my grandparents’ language, it was as simple as that.
In the 70s studying languages in the spare time was popular (ie, for everyone) and not elitarian like it is today. In Triest we could mix English lessons with the afternoon’s hobby activities and this twice a week starting from age 6. Slovene courses were organized by the municipality for Italian-speaking parents and kids, but the late evening timing made it tough for kids to follow the intricacies of the Slovene grammar.
Eventually you ended up getting used to the German rhythm by eavesdropping the older people at the Caffe’ San Marco and picked up the Slovene basic items of conversation at the grocer’s even before starting studying any grammar. More importantly, you got used to the fact that, NO, not always people speak your language, quite to the contrary! You have to adapt, make an effort, try to communicate by decoding a few keywords. The Yugoslavian kids I played with were amazing to my eyes: they could speak Italian, Croatian, Slovene and would never mix up the languages, because they learnt Italian at school, spoke Slovene with mummy and Croatian with the grand parents and then Triestine dialect with all of them. These are the things which make you want to learn.
A recent article by Markus Albers hints to a new wave of language teaching in Germany, in so-called Moderne Schule. Not complimentary, but not elitarian either. Affordable. But most of all, mixed in the pupils’ everyday life. It’s hard to re-create the spontaneous learning environment of an extended multikulti family and of a multilingual playground, but not impossible.
I love your style of writing. Super article and great site thank you!
I couldn’t agree more. As a bilingual French-British family living near Paris, we generally speak English at home and try to avoid the effortless franglais that can make us become lazy. Our task it to ensure we find our words in the same tongue and in the same sentence without switching! We do switch to French when doing homework, though. That’s when my kids correct my French
At first my children mixed languages before they learned to slot them into the 2 definite categories. It was hilarious at first when they first started to speak: decendre-me; regarde – car! (voiture too much of a mouthful!). L’eau, not water.
You are so right, since they do identify the language with the person who speaks it.
Jill Dear
merci ;D
I guess that we European should play this multikulti thing to our advantage…the Swiss, Eastern European and Nordics have understood that long ago, the Germans pretend not to speak foreign languages (but just because they’re such perfectionists), whereas the Latin countries stick to their “simpatico” languages (be it French, Spanish or Italian) without making any effort at the policy level. So it’s down to the individual family to make an extra effort.
Just like for everything else, really.
ciao!
Striped
many thanks to Markus Twitter hint today
http://www.thinkglobalschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=131757
did you notice the cities on the map? ;D