We often get asked about using the word Spanglish as part of our blog’s name. I’m sure it has to do with the negative connotation the word has. You see, a lot of people assume that those of us who use Spanglish do it because we don’t know either language well enough when, in reality, the exact opposite is true. Our definition of Spanglish is the ability to go back and forth between languages effortlessly because we can.

One of my favorite books on bilingualism, Bilingual: Life and Reality written by Professor Emeritus François Grosjean, a bilingualism expert of international stature and a bilingual (English/French) himself, has this to say about code-switching:

“Code-switching is a verbal skill requiring a large degree of linguistic competence in more than one language, rather than a defect arising from insufficient knowledge of one or the other… [R]ather than presenting deviant behavior, [it] is actually a suggestive indicator of degree of bilingual competence.”

Another excellent part of Prof. Grosjean’s chapter on code-switching is his exploration of why bilinguals do it.

Reasons Why We Code-Switch

1) Sometimes the other language has a better word or phrase to express a particular idea.

I do this a lot with adjectives, for example, and it really has nothing to do with not knowing the equivalent in either language. It’s rather a matter of using the better word to describe what I am trying to say.

2) Sometimes the words we code-switch are the only ones we have or they are more readily available in the other language.

This is not to say that we don’t necessarily know the correct word in the language we’re using. This has more to do with something extremely interesting Prof. Grosjean calls the “complementary principle” which basically has to do with the notion that for bilinguals different aspects of life, such as work, family, school, sports, hobbies, etc., require different languages. For example, I spent a large part of my career as a television producer and although I worked for Univision for many years surrounded with bilinguals (with different levels of proficiency), we would always switch to English whenever we were talking about technical terminology related to, say, editing video. It just made more sense to do so since in the case of editing video, for instance, the software was in English.

3) Sometimes we code-switch as a communicative tool, including to exclude someone or to show expertise.

If you’re bilingual, you’ve surely done this: switched to the minority language so that those around you can’t understand. Sometimes it might be to say something specifically about those you’re excluding; sometimes you just don’t want others to listen to what you’re saying. If you’re bilingual, you’ve surely been embarrassed when you found out the person you were trying to exclude actually spoke the minority language, too!

Keep in mind, though, that it’s important to remember that in terms of raising bilingual children, the experts agree that while they’re learning both languages it’s better if they’re exposed to each of them in a monolingual setting. In other words, children learn by example, so the less mixing you do, the less mixing they’ll do—at least until they become proficient in both languages.

{Photo by peapodsquadmom}

My wife, my son and I spent the weekend with my family. Along with my parents, some other relatives came and stayed as well. It was a great time filled with food, laughs and trips down memory lane. Naturally, questions arose about our son and how we speak to him in Spanish. One interesting question I was asked is stated was “What are you going to do when he speaks half English half Spanish sentences?”

This caught me a little off guard. I just immediately responded “We will encourage him and tell him he is the best little talker in the world.” I wasn’t really sure what other kind of answer could possibly be given. It got me thinking though… people who don’t understand bilingualism, well, don’t understand bilingualism. They see it as a ‘problem’ if the child code switches or goes through a transitional phase where they mix up languages; English grammar with Spanish words or vice-a-versa.

The reality is that there is nothing wrong with that.

The follow-up question was along the lines of “You are going to be the only one who understands him.” I can see their point with regards to the communication issues, and perhaps this is a proverbial bridge we will cross, however this is hardly a deterrent from choosing the bilingual lifestyle. Difficulties will most likely present themselves, and these difficulties will lead to new opportunities to learn and grow as a family. Will my English-only parents be confused at times when we are talking as a family or they are trying to talk to my son? Probably. Will it be that big of a deal? No. Frankly, I’m confused about half of the time I’m talking to children anyway.

Our little guy will learn to figure it out. He will grow, develop, and home in on who speaks what language, when and to what degree. In fact, this may happen sooner than later! A recent post of mine talks about how bilingual children start deciding which language is which as early as six or seven months old! This is the beauty of children growing up with two or more languages; they just get it. They learn very quickly what they need to do to be understood. They have to, really, as they don’t have a whole lot of other options!

Has anyone else experienced these types of questions or comments? What was the situation and how did you respond? Comment below and share your experience.

Jeffrey Nelson blogs about being bilingual, raising bilingual children, and all things bilingual at Living Bilingual.com . He and his wife, Gyovanna, are currently raising their 11-month old child, Liam, as a bilingual in English/Spanish. Jeff loves the fact that his son will grow up bilingual and bicultural, a long way removed from his own past growing up in North Dakota; the antithesis of the bicultural childhood.

{Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Nelson}

My daughter has been attending her dual immersion school in Spanish for almost three months now and I can honestly say she’s made a lot of progress. I think the most noticeable improvement has been in her increased self-esteem and the value she’s now given to speaking Spanish.  She tries much harder to complete sentences in Spanish and doesn’t get frustrated when I nudge her to speak it.

My husband keeps insisting that she’s speaking way too much English and he’s not sure she’ll be speaking fluent Spanish with us anymore. I always disagree and ask him to perceive the small details that have changed. Things like her asking us to put the Spanish option on when she watches Phineas and Ferb or Doc McStuffins on Disney Junior, something that was seriously not happening months, even days, before school started. She also asks us which of her books are in Spanish so that we can read those for her at night. Not only that, I notice many new words that were not part of her vocabulary that she’s now throwing in the mix of her mostly-Spanglish phrases.

And that’s what her “language” really is right now at this stage – a mix of Spanish and English – but not the kind to shudder at. What I mean is that the words she uses are said correctly in each language, she’s just mixing words from both languages into one sentence.

Read: My Daughter is Not as Bilingual as I Thought

I was noticing this a lot more this weekend after her friend came to play. It always seems like it takes her a while to switch back from English-only mode when she’s with friends, to trying-to-speak-Spanish mode with her mom and dad. At that moment it dawned on me that every time I’d make her repeat in Spanish whatever she was so excited to tell me about (and she’s notorious for non-stop chatter!), she had to make an effort to “grab” the words she needed.

What I realized is that even though she’s making tremendous progress at school, and her love for Spanish and the fact she’s bilingual is at an all-time high, we still need to make a lot more effort at making sure Spanish is front and center in her life and her brain. Her receptive Spanish-language skills are perfect, yet she’s lacking in her expressive skills.

Read: 5 Ways to Motivate Your Child to Speak Spanish When he Refuses to

My conclusion of this is that we definitely need to immerse her a lot more in situations where she will need to express herself in Spanish. She needs to use the words much more without having to think about them. I know they are all there because they eventually come out, but it needs to become a fluid process.

I’m not worried about it happening, but it did make me realize that raising a bilingual child is definitely a work-in-progress that requires many tools in the toolbox. Not the same tools will work for all since every family is different and unique, but we do all need an arsenal of tricks until we find what works best for our kids.

Share with me in the comments below what you do that works the best. What bilingualism stage is your child at?

With the rise of dual language education in the U.S., have bilingual children become a commodity? In other words, are children who walk into the dual language classroom already speaking two languages possessing a highly valued commodity: bilingualism? The question, though, still remains, whose bilingualism is valued? Is it the “middle class” students bilingualism or is it those students who come from “lower class” homes?

To distinguish between “middle” and “lower” I’d like to clarify how I am referring to the two kinds of bilinguals. There are those whose parents have a formal education and belong to a certain (higher) economic bracket and those whose parents have a limited formal education and come from lower economic brackets, generally speaking. Both bilinguals are what we, in academia, call heritage-speakers of a minority language (like Spanish).

This past week my little girl completed her first year at Escuelita del Alma. At the end of each year the escuelita (little school) puts on a recital where each classroom dances to a Spanish song. The theme was “Los Insectos….and Other Little Critters.” One of the many reasons why I love and chose this escuelita for my daughter is because they value linguistic diversity. As you can see in the very title of the production there is a code-switch: Spanish and English are used in a single phrase. I love that because it reflects a common linguistic feature (code-switching) of the bilingual community we live in here in central Texas.

In an earlier post I wrote about my experience while visiting another Spanish immersion school before deciding where my daughter would attend. It was at that other school where I was informed “We don’t use Tex-Mex here.” What they failed to realize is the importance in being able to communicate with members of our local community, in addition to being able to perform linguistically in academic settings, like the classroom. For this reason I decided to enroll my daughter elsewhere, but also because they insulted a key feature of my linguistic repertoire!

My parents were or would be categorized as lower class Mexican immigrants and I was/am a heritage-speaker of Spanish, though when I was in elementary school in the 80’s dual language education was not an option. Now, I am a middle-class and highly educated parent of a daughter I am raising with multiple languages.

I presume her multilingualism will be a highly valued commodity as local schools try to fill dual language classrooms with “native” Spanish-speakers. What I will continue to strive for, as a parent and academic, is placing greater value in the varying ways people use Spanish and English like we do in central Texas!

One of the the things that can put parents who are raising bilingual children off the most – aside from their kid not responding back in the target language – is when they start mixing languages. Our first thought is that our child is falling “behind” in terms of language acquisition, but nothing can be further from the truth.

My girl is almost five years old now and is very aware that she’s about to start a new stage in her life in a few months when she enters kindergarten in a dual language immersion program in Spanish. Up until now she’s been attending an English-only Montessori and speaking Spanish at home and with family and friends. What’s happened is that her language of play and of “academics” (ABC’s, etc) has been mostly in English. I do supplement at home, but she’ s not very open to learning with me. So now that we’re talking about how she’ll have teachers who speak only in Spanish and she’ll be learning to read and write in Spanish, she’s become oddly aware that she mixes languages.

I realized this last week because I had to take her to an assessment test for her new school where they would evaluate at what level she’s at with her letters and numbers in Spanish to help the teacher prepare class materials, divide the two classes, etc. I was preparing her for this by telling her she’d be speaking in Spanish and they wanted to know how beautifully she spoke. Then, she stopped me and very seriously said, “Pero yo hablo inglés, mamá.” Yes, she has a way of telling me these things in Spanish and utterly contradicting herself. I reminded her that she spoke Spanish really well and she just needed to turn on her Spanish brain chip  when there. Her response: “But I mix them.”

And she’s right. She does mix them, a lot.

What I loved about this conversation was the fact that she’s aware that she mixes the two languages. I’m not quite sure if this is something a teacher told her, if we’ve unconsciously mentioned it in front of her or if she just came to this realization all on her own. The important thing was to reassure her that it is okay, and it really is.

Mixing languages at this early age is just a phase and actually one that indicates she has a perfect grasp of both languages. What she does is considered one of the first phases of code-switching and experts agree it takes a well-nurtured bilingual brain to be able to master it. It’s not laziness or lack of knowledge of the languages, it’s just a natural phase in which she’s sorting out both languages and learning when and where to use each. Since English still dominates my girl’s language of play, it’s easier for her to switch to it when she’s playing hide-n-seek with me or when she’s explaining something that happens at school. She mixes in Spanish with me because she’s making a real effort to speak only Spanish and tries wherever she can. However, when she’s in school she pretty much sticks to English because she knows they don’t understand Spanish at all. Am I making sense?

Psycholinguist Elizabeth Lanza describes in her book Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective what my girl is doing as language socialization, meaning that the child learns when it’s appropriate to mix languages and when it’s not. Lanza also explains that “for the child growing up bilingually, learning when and where not to code-switch is an important aspect of language socialization.”

One of the reasons our blog is called SpanglishBaby (aside from the fact it just sounds fun!) is that we recognized early on that all our bilingual (Spanish/English) kids would eventually go through this phrase and we want to embrace it for what it is. If you’re going through this now, or will get there eventually, just know that the most important thing is to not make a big deal about it in front of your child. You can always check out these 5 Ways To Respond When Your Child Mixes Languages and heed our expert’s advice when asked What to Do If My Child Mixes Languages.

Share: Is your child mixing languages or has she/he? Tell us about it!

Photo credit: blmurch

Last week I was pretty taken aback when I heard someone say that “el Spanglish es una aberración” (literally an aberration, an outrage). The craziest thing is that this person — an old colleague and friend of my husband’s who is Argentinian, but has lived in Miami for a long time —  said this as he admitted to using it himself!

Then I realized I got exactly what he meant because I used to be one of them: the anti-Spanglish, anti code-switching type. And, apparently, I was not alone.

One of the most respected scholars, experts and authors in the realm of bilingualism, and a bilingual himself, François Grosjean, wrote about this very topic just last week in his blog on Psychology Today:

Even though it is widespread, code-switching has been criticized by some who feel that it is done out of pure laziness and that it is a grammarless mixture of two languages. Many pejorative names have been used to characterize this bilingual form of communication such as Tex-Mex and Franglais. Even the word “mixing” has now taken on negative overtones. One consequence of this is that some bilinguals never code-switch and may look down upon others who do, while others restrict it to a situation in which they will not be stigmatized for doing so.

For me, it wasn’t so much that it bothered me when others code-switched, it had more to do with my own use of Spanglish – as I’ve written about before. Sometimes I still think it’s amazing that I used to think that way.

Luckily, one of the grandest things the SpanglishBaby community has brought into my life, is my own understanding and acceptance of what it really means, at least for me, to live bilingually and biculturally. I’ve finally learned to embrace the fact that I feel completely comfortable speaking both English and Spanish and that both of them — and the cultures that come with each — define me. I absolutely love that if I’m with someone who feels the same way, I can go back and forth between languages, sometimes mid-sentence, with a comforting ease that makes the conversation that much better!

So, of course, I went on to share all I’ve learned about bilingualism, mixing languages and code-switching with my husband’s colleague. After he listened to me a while, he was genuinely interested in what I was saying and told me he had never really looked at code-switching that way. Even more amazingly, he confessed that code-switching actually helps him when his stuttering gets out of control. In other words, if he’s speaking to another bilingual in, say, Spanish and he starts stuttering, he’ll switch to English to say the word he’s stuck on and then get back to the original language of their conversation! Absolutely amazing, ¿no creen?

Well, I wanted to gauge what your own thoughts are on Spanglish and code-switching, so I went to our Facebook page to ask and this is what you told us:

It looks like one of the main things is trying to figure out the definition of Spanglish or code-switching. I don’t say troca for truck either, but I do go back and forth between languages — not ALL the time. Whenever it happens, it just comes out my mouth naturally. Here’s some more:

So, what do YOU think? We’d love to continue the conversation and learn from what you have to say, so please share your thoughts on this topic!

Photo credit: AnyaLogic

I used to be pretty harsh on myself if I couldn’t finish a sentence without going back and forth between English and Spanish when speaking with other bilinguals, an action commonly known as code-switching among linguists. Like many bilinguals and monolinguals alike, I simply believed this was wrong. I thought it meant I wasn’t really proficient in either language—even when I knew this not to be the case—or that I was simply forgetting my Spanish. I was wrong!

In the last couple of years, I have read countless of definitions of code-switching (alternating between two languages), but none had really explained it as clearly as the one I recently read in the book, Bilingual: Life and Reality. Written by Professor Emeritus François Grosjean, a bilingualism expert of international stature and a bilingual (English/French) himself, the book has been a real treat to read. For the first time, I’ve gotten explanations to some particular behavior associated with bilingualism about which I’ve always wondered.

Reading the chapter dedicated to code-switching was an eye-opener. I found particularly interesting what Prof. Grosjean had to say in terms of debunking the beliefs that bilinguals who code-switch do so out of laziness or because they don’t know either language well enough to just stick to one language. According to the author, code-switching is actually not easy to do. He goes on to quote linguist Shana Poplack who’s done extensive research on code-switching and presents an entirely new (to me) definition of this behavior:

“Code-switching is a verbal skill requiring a large degree of linguistic competence in more than one language, rather than a defect arising from insufficient knowledge of one or the other… [R]ather than presenting deviant behavior, [it] is actually a suggestive indicator of degree of bilingual competence.”

I had never really thought about this as an option, but the more you think about it, the more it makes complete sense. It’s crazy the bad rap that code-switching has been given—and I am the first one to admit I propagated the myth—when in reality is an intrinsic part of being bilingual. I would like to point out; however, that code-switching is not the same as another type of behavior common among many bilinguals: borrowing. According to Prof. Grosjean, this has more to do with using a word of short phrase from the minority language and adapting it in form and sound into the majority language. Something similar to what I described my daughter doing in this post.

Another excellent part of Prof. Grosjean’s chapter on code-switching is his exploration of why bilingual do it.

Reasons Why We Code-Switch

1) Sometimes the other language has a better word or phrase to express a particular idea.

I talk about this reason in particular in the post I mentioned above. I do this a lot with adjectives, for example, and it really has nothing to do with not knowing the equivalent in either language. It’s rather a matter of using the better word to describe what I am trying to say.

2) Sometimes the words we code-switch are the only ones we have or they are more readily available in the other language.

This is not to say that we don’t necessarily know the correct word in the language we’re using. This has more to do with something extremely interesting Prof. Grosjean calls the “complementary principle” which basically has to do with the notion that for bilinguals different aspects of life, such as work, family, school, sports, hobbies, etc., require different languages. For example, I spent a large part of my career as a television producer and although I worked for Univision for many years surrounded with bilinguals (with different levels of proficiency), we would always switch to English whenever we were talking about technical terminology related to, say, editing video. It just made more sense to do so since in the case of editing video, for instance, the software was in English.

3) Sometimes we code-switch as a communicative tool, including to exclude someone or to show expertise.

If you’re bilingual, you’ve surely done this: switched to the minority language so that those around you can’t understand. Sometimes it might be to say something specifically about those you’re excluding; sometimes you just don’t want others to listen to what you’re saying. If you’re bilingual, you’ve surely been embarrassed when you found out the person you were trying to exclude actually spoke the minority language, too!

Note:

While I was extremely happy to find another way of looking at code-switching, it’s important to remember that in terms of raising bilingual children, the experts agree that while they’re learning both languages it’s better if they’re exposed to each of them in a monolingual setting. In other words, children learn by example, so the less mixing you do, the less mixing they’ll do—at least until they become proficient in both languages.

Prof. Grosjean’s book, Bilingual: Life and Reality, has tons of extremely interesting information regarding what it is like to be bilingual. I plan on sharing a series of posts regarding some of these aspects later on, not to mention an interview with the Professor in the near future.

Update:If you’d like to find out more about Prof. Grosjean, including his answers to specific questions about bilingualism, I invite you to check out MultilingualLiving, an awesome new website I’ve been meaning to share with all of you. MultilingualLiving is the new site by the founder of the Bilingual/Bicultural Family Network and publisher of Multilingual Living Magazine, an amazing digital publication which unfortunately ceased to exist last year.

In the meantime, what is your definition of code-switching? Does (or did) it also have a negative connotation in your view? Why?

Tell us, what are your reasons for teaching your child Spanish?

Encuentra este y más de nuestros artículos favoritos en español en el blog Mamás Latinas: Hijos Bilingües en Discovery Familia.

Photo credit: The 5h Ape

“He’s confused.”

This seems to be the refrain of my interactions with monolinguals these days. Talking is the big milestone for two-year-olds and would be the topic of conversation even if I weren’t speaking Spanish with my son. Because I am, though, it feels like a rather contentious subject.

SpanglishBaby readers are already familiar with the debate over code-switching and its role in fluency. We know that experts confirm that mixing languages is a sophisticated linguistic skill, not a sign of confusion. Still, getting this across to those outside our like-minded community (and feeling like we have to) can cause more stress than it’s worth.

Instead of sharing in the excitement over my hijito’s new words, the English speakers in my life hesitate to applaud him.  Despite knowing plenty of bilingual adults, they don’t quite believe my mL@H method will work. What exactly they predict will happen instead is anybody’s guess. The fear that bilingualism strikes in some of my acquaintances apparently allows them to imagine that my son is going to be a mute and end up knowing zero languages rather than two.

“Don’t confuse everyone else.”

This statement more accurately reflects what people are saying when they comment on one child’s strange and indecipherable speech patterns.  Everyone is afraid of that which s/he does not understand. By choosing to raise our children to be bilingual, we thrust this reality into the faces of onlookers. Parenting, as we know, invites excess onlookers. Furthermore, parenting decisions that are anything but mainstream open a proverbial “can of worms.” In the culturally-defensive, linguistically-delayed America, we can expect a lot of worms to come crawling out when there are witnesses to our Spanish use.

I love being able to communicate with my little one in public without worrying about eavesdroppers. I don’t like overhearing the details of other mothers’ conversations with their kids and I wouldn’t want just anyone to find a way into the mundane details of my parent-child dealings.

Despite what they with the big oídos and even bigger bocas may think, I am not trying to confuse everyone else. I am speaking to my child in the language that I have used with him since birth, and that is our business. No, I am not talking about you when I speak to him in Spanish.

“The Spanish will confuse him when he goes to school.”

I cannot wait for this one to be debunked. Certainly, some bilingual children appear to struggle in preschool and the early elementary years. From my tutoring experience and hearsay, though, I realize that this is yet another misunderstanding. Imagine this:

You place an English book in front of a monolingual English speaker (6 years old). He doesn’t have to guess what language the book is written in or consider the order of the words. It will reflect what he has heard in speech. All he has to do is learn to recognize the letters in print and start to pronounce them.

You place the same English book in front of a bilingual speaker of the same age. He must go through an identical process of putting letters together, but then decide which set of grammar and pronunciation rules these words follow before he can make the leap to comprehension.

Is it surprising or worrisome that the second child will take longer to learn to read?

By the same token, should we worry when our newly verbal, bilingual toddlers take longer to put together complex sentences than their monolingual counterparts?

Obviously, the answer is no.

Bilingualism, like integrity and money sense, is another tool we give our children to prepare them for the rest of their lives. It deserves merely positive scrutiny, and the only thing that warrants true confusion is why there aren’t more code-switching, “confused” children in this country.

“Hi there! I am happy to have found your website! My husband and I are expecting our first baby and I want to know the best way to raise our child bilingual. Both my husband and I are Mexican, bilingual (he born in Michoacan, my parents from Queretaro but I was born here, both educated in California).

Among our relatives, the second generation (nieces/nephews) fall into one of the following:

1. Refusal to learn or speak Spanish;

2. Those who don’t know Spanish (some because my uncles, aunts were teased for their strong accent that they didn’t want their own children to struggle with that;

3. Those who speak Spanglish, ex: “Grandma, yo ‘stoy hungry, quiero food” or “ven mija para ponerte tus shoes”.

Of all 3 situations, the one I struggle with the most is the last one, mostly because as I grew up my grandfather adamantly corrected me and would make me re-phrase it correctly. Also, I work as a substitute teacher in a school district where 89.1% of the children are Hispanic and notice how much Spanglish is being spoken in the playground among the children born here and even being adapted by the children going through an ELD program. I notice I am following my grandfather’s footsteps, but is that the best solution?

I would love to get your insight on this.”

Dear Gloria,

I love your question! Mostly because the issues you discuss are the most common issues you encounter while raising children bilingually and probably the biggest challenge that prevents parents from raising bilingual children.  I have so many friends that are giving up because their kids refuse to speak the minority language or mix languages – something that often scares parents.

First of all, let me start by saying that it takes effort to get your child to speak two or three languages.  This is because we live in a country in which English is the dominant,  most prestigious, and most well supported language around our children. Since children become aware of this really early (my research would say as early as one year and ten months), they often tend to gravitate towards it, never learning, leaving behind, and in the long run, forgetting any other language that they have been exposed to.

One way to avoid this is to provide, in the early years (0 to 5), a language environment that emphasizes the minority language. This can be done if the child is at home with you, he/she is taken care by a Spanish-speaking caregiver, or attends a bilingual or Spanish language preschool.  Most importantly, in order for the child to learn the minority language, it is crucial that, during the early years, he/she is raised in a nurturing and stimulating environment where he/she can have plenty of interaction in this language and form an overall positive experience and connection with it. He/she also needs to see – on a daily basis – that this language is valuable, that many other people speak it, and that you are proud of him/her using it. Recall that the minority language is in a weak position with respect to the majority language, and it needs extra nurturing and attention (this is basically why so many children in the US who heard plenty of Spanish in childhood never learned it, refuse to speak it, or lose it). Once the child is in this position, he shouldn’t get into the “don’t want to speak it” trap, at least until adolescence (but that’s another issue – he/she won’t forget the language then).

As for mixing languages, expect that early on, at least until age 3, the child will mix languages, even if you don’t do it. This is completely normal and harmless since the child is learning both languages and won’t know all words in either one. However, it is how you react to mixing that determines how much language mixing the child will do at later ages. If the child mixes languages or uses the “wrong” language with you (i.e. English if you use Spanish), do not just show understanding and move on with the conversation. Show to your child that although you might understand, you expect Spanish because this is the language that you speak. When the child is very young and says “ball” pointing to a ball, say something like “yeah, daddy (or grandma or Susie) says ‘ball’ but mommy says ‘pelota.’” When he/she is a bit older,  ask him/her to rephrase what he/she is saying using only Spanish (yes, your grandpa’s strategy!). Of course you can’t force the issue because you want your child to enjoy talking to you.

At the same time, if you do want him/her to eventually be able to really speak the language (fluently, not like a second language learner), then you must socialize him/her into keeping the languages separate from the start – Spanish at home and English outside, Spanish-only sentences and English-only sentences. This can be done fairly easily if, again, you adopt this strategy from the moment the child is born. It just becomes so natural to the child to use only one language with you, that language mixing is abandoned as soon as he/she has enough vocabulary and is even frowned upon by the child. I adopted this strategy myself and my daughters never, never address me in English. In fact, they get furious if I use even a single English word when talking to them (“don’t speak like that!!” – they scream). However, they use plenty of Italian with their English-speaking father because he has always accepted Italian from them. The result is that at 5 and 3 and a half they are completely fluent in Italian but they still use sporadic Italian words in their English, especially the younger one.

This tells you how important it is the way we react to language mixing. I really feel that it determines how proficient the child will eventually become in the minority language.

Good luck,

Simona

Simona Montanari, Ph. D.

Simona Montanari – Assistant Professor of Child and Family Studies at California State University in Los Angeles. She is the department’s expert in early multilingual development and has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. Simona is Italian and she’s also a mommy to trilingual daughters aged 3 and 4 1/2. In addition, she conducts workshop titled: “How to Raise a Bilingual Child” in the LA area. You can read her answers here.

As always, feel free to leave your thoughts or advice about this in the comments below. You can also leave your own question for the Experts here.

We invite you to visit our new sister site, SpanglishBabyFinds, where we review the coolest products made with Latino and/or bilingual kids in mind. There’s a giveaway every week!