contributors

It’s inevitable. Someone is bound to “curiously” question our intentions behind raising a trilingual baby. They want to know, “Why? Why have you decided to pursue this unpredictable and challenging path?” It’s an honest question. After all, it’s not like we live in Barcelona where there are two “official” languages in the autonomous Catalonia. It’s not like I’m from Germany and my husband, Marcus, is from France and we are living in an English speaking community. So, why? Why French?Read More ...

As the parent who speaks the minority language to my children at home, it’s occasionally tempting to dwell on the fact that it can be hard.  After all, the task of keeping the Spanish going at home falls squarely on my shoulders, right?  I’m the one who has to be so disciplined and intentional (my new favorite buzzword) when doing something as simple as speaking with my children, all the time.  The pressure, I realize, is self imposed, but itRead More ...

Tita was mi Abuelita.  She was a vivacious, loud, loving bull of a woman.  She lived with my family since before I was born, and until she died when I was 16 and she was 83.  We slept in side-by-side twin beds until my brother moved out when I started high school.  Late at night, we would talk about nothing and everything–she would teach me Spanish prayers and make the silliest jokes that made us both giggle.  When my fatherRead More ...

“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 signRead More ...

Since I have made the deliberate decision to raise a trilingual baby so many realizations have blossomed especially as I near the end of my pregnancy. So, as a result, what did I do? I did what aspiring doctoral students do best: research about trilingualism and parenting. In fact, I found a way to combine this interest with one of my graduate courses and am in the process of creating an annotated bibliography about trilingualism, which I am more thanRead More ...