minority language

How to Ask Your Bilingual Child the Right Questions about School

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Autumn is here, and that means it’s time to look at some of the issues facing parents of school-age bilingual children. Our kids are in school, and every day we ask the usual question: “How was school today?” Their unchanging reply: “Good.” Keeping the Bilingual Focus Like most parents raising their children bilingually, we always want them to talk more in the minority language. Unless your children attend a bilingual or immersion school, their minority language probably isn’t used duringRead More ...

Is My Own Multilingualism A Threat To My Children’s Minority Language?

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I am Polish, my husband is German and we live in the Netherlands. I was raised in a multilingual family — my mother speaks English and my father speaks French and they both speak Polish and German. With our children, we have naturally assumed the OPOL approach in which I speak Polish with them and my husband speaks German. I read a lot about bilingualism. All the books warned that it is normal for children to rebel against parents andRead More ...

Expose Your Kids to Spanish in These Unlikely Places

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I’m not a huge breakfast eater — unless I go to the French bakery by my house, which is run by a couple from the south of France who moved to Denver five years ago. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but the bakery is on my way to Santiago’s preschool and so I stop in there regularly to devour freshly-baked croissants and the best baguettes I’ve ever had outside of France. But one of the other reasonsRead More ...

Who Is A Native Speaker And Does It Matter?

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Recently a question in the Ask an Expert column really grabbed my attention since the writer wanted to know if she should speak a language to her child that was not her mother tongue.  The main concern being that her daughter would not be getting much native input in this second language. This article really made me stop and think because I have been speaking to my sons exclusively in Spanish since the day they were born, and I amRead More ...

How Much Does It “Cost” To Become Multilingual?

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Who gets to be trilingual? The situation always seems to present itself as such: one parent speaks one minority language and the other parent another minority language and they live somewhere, where the majority language is spoken. What about those parents who are monolingual? What about parents who are both what they call heritage speakers of a minority language, like myself? What about parents who would LOVE for their children to speak more than one language, but can’t afford toRead More ...

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