One day - One language

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How to increase a minority language exposure It is inevitable that in any multi-lingual family setting one or more languages get more time and focus than the others. Naturally one of the parents or any other adult speaking minority language just gets to spend more time with the kids. Whether a stay at home parent, caregiver or maybe the one that spends a long morning commute with the child. Or there is more relatives around speaking the language. Or simply the adult responsible for passing on the minority language is just not as comfortable with it, gets limited time, cannot naturally hold conversation with a young child or simply gets frustrated to be in it alone.  As the time progresses and LingoPapa works hard away from home to support us, he gets limited time to speak and actively teach children Urdu. It a language that needs more attention in our household. Not only we get the least exposure to it but it also needs more attention due to its Persian script and bad ha
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The "WHAT" ...mother tongue, father tongue or language?

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When deciding for multilingual upbringing  for your kids, it is important to clarify for yourself what you want to teach them. Your conscious intention is crucial to the success.

From the very beginning we knew we want them to learn our respective mother tongues (Urdu and Czech). Living in a country that is English speaking we knew this is not going to be an easy task considering we do not have extended family here.

Kid's multilingual library items
We searched for a strategy that would work for us the best. We unanimously settled on One Person One Language (OPOL) approach. There will be a separate blog post on this and links to other strategies later on.

We also decided later on that we want to teach them some of the languages we speak other than our mother tongues and possibly learn a new one with them.
We are currently working on French and Arabic by speaking  and exposing these to them. Watch out for posts on how we do that and what is the success.

Remember, it does not mean that if you don't speak another language you cannot start to study it with the child and set her to become bilingual later in life.

The funny thing is I am not sure what our kids' mother tongue is... well let's say they have a mother tongue, father tongue and native language at the moment.
What is your mother tongue? 


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