This week’s question was sent in by Lily Herbik. You too can get an answer by sending your question to our experts right here.
“My situation is very specific:)) Me and my husband are both Polish living in Thailand now. We would like our son (a 7 month baby:)) to become trilingual (English, Thai & Polish). Polish and Thai (with the right accent) seem to be plausible. We will speak Polish at home and obviously he will have ample exposure to Thai.
How about English then? This is my main concern. I could teach him the language, but I don’t want our baby to acquire my eastern accent. There are many international kingergartens in here (native speakers), so it seems to be a good solution, but his Thai will be neglected… A vicious circle, isn’t it? I have an idea of playing with him in English using songs, cartoons etc but it won’t be enough for the correct accent, I guess… what do you suggest?
Thanks a lot!!!
PS. Many international nurseries here accept babies from the age of 10 months. What do you think about it? My husband says it’s much too early… In my opinion it’s NEVER too early!”,
Lily”
Dear Lily,
What a lovely problem to have—too many languages to choose from. How can you decide which languages to emphasize and when? The great thing is that there are many good solutions. It just depends on what you want. Your son should be able to learn all three languages, but I think you will want to promote them in the order of their importance to you and your husband, and eventually to your son.
Should I assume that Polish is the most important? You and your husband speak it together. Your son has Polish heritage on both sides. Are you planning to return to Poland? Will you receive visits or communicate (for example on Skype) with people in Poland? It would seem that you have lots of avenues to help your boy learn it, but not so many that you can take It for granted.
What about Thai? Will your child go to school in Thailand? Will his playmates be Thai speakers? In that case, Thai will be very important for him in both his social and intellectual development. You do not say in your letter what strategy you are counting on for him to learn it. Household help? Schools? The playground? Just hearing the language around him, but not addressed to him, will not be enough. On the one hand, if he won’t be having preschool friends who speak Thai, you may want to wait till closer to the time when he starts to school to emphasize it. On the other hand, though, learning Thai early has other advantages. This is not my expertise speaking here, but I have heard in anecdotes that it is harder to learn a first tonal language like Thai when you’re older. Learning Thai will develop your child’s ear for tones, and he will be used to the idea that different tones make different meanings. That is, (according to Wikipedia), na with a falling tone is ‘face’ and na with a rising tone is ‘thick,’ while in English you need a whole different sound to change the meaning, like “me” and “my” or “pa” and “ha.”) Thai can also be a step toward other more global tonal languages—like Chinese.
Finally, that leaves English. You don’t mention that your husband speaks English, so l’ll assume he doesn’t. You may be thinking from a global perspective that English will eventually be more useful to your child than Thai, but it doesn’t sound like it will be early on. So you have more time before you need to emphasize it for him. I like your idea of songs and games and maybe a part-time nursery or playgroup for English, or finding yourself some English-speaking friends with children, to get it started. But you probably don’t want it to take away from your Polish interactions within the family. Later, after Thai is well established, you may want to investigate schools or nurseries, or find a social circle to help your son add English.
As you say, it’s never too early to start learning a language, but if your husband feels it’s too early to send your boy to a nursery without a pressing reason to do so (like work, for example), you can always turn to one of your other options, at least at the beginning.
Best of luck in sorting it all out.
Barbara
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. – A bilingualism expert with over twenty years of research experience in the fields of bilingualism, linguistics, and communication disorders, Pearson is the author of the informative and extremely useful book 
What an amazingly well written and thoughtful answer to a difficult question – lots of love, wisdom and common sense nicely mixed together. Thank you Barbara!
Great question and excellent answer! We are monolinguals raising a very fluent trilingual ( English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish) , so know how hard it can be, but it CAN be done. The work does not finish in babyhood either as many children lose their languages ( even native tongues) as quickly as they pick them up.
I think you are right that there are some advantages of learning from birth or as early as possible. We’ve found that one does not have to be perfectly fluent to give a language to a baby. My husband is not fluent in Spanish and he has an accent, yet he was instrumental in helping our child be fluent in Spanish from birth.
We did supplement other things ( native speaking babysitters, went to play groups with all native Spanish speakers, watched and listened to Spanish videos and music daily, read books in Spanish starting inutero etc) but we had a baby sitter who was a teacher in Columbia who ran their bilingual program. She was so amazed at how perfect our child’s Spanish was ( especially compared to her father who had poor, bad accent Spanish) that she talked her sister in Columbia in doing the same method with her baby. ( She had been afraid to do it because of her non-perfect English).
So you could consider always talking to your child in English ( and making sure the child ALWAYS answers you back in English which is key) and let your husband always communicate with the child in Polish.
If you supplement the English in other ways, you will be quite pleased and surprised by the results.
Just an idea based on our experiences. Good luck!
It’s always interesting to read about other parents teaching their children more than one language. At the moment, I speak spanish to our 2 year old, Hubby speaks Croatian (we are living in Croatia) so she also gets the language from grandparents and great-grandparents. She picks up some english from my interaction with hubby, but he thinks it’s time to also teach her more English. I’m not as concerned since she will be attending school in the states.But I do wonder is she will have an accent?
Good questions and great advice.
Good luck.
Elisa, when I first moved to Houston and started getting to know people, I was surprised by how many adults I met who told me they’d arrived here as children speaking no English beforehand and yet they had no accent. Plus, it became very obvious to me there was no difference in the English skills, between those whose parents had continued speaking their native language at home, and those whose parents switched to English-only. This is just one person’s observation but I think the experts’ information bears this out too. Children pick up the language and accent of whomever they spend a lot of time talking with. As soon as they’re old enough for school, that’s where they’ll be all day. I predict your child will have an accent for about five minutes.