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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Dip in & keep it fresh - siblings' language strategy

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Very often siblings end up speaking with each other in the majority language. We have had that issue too. And yes it may come back in the future but at the moment our children don't speak in majority language together. Yay! ( Albeit might be temporary.)

In previous post I described how we managed to set one of the minority languages spoken (Czech) in our home as a language of communication between our children. Well, now we work on the second minority language spoken at home to become a more spoken language between them. Ideally, when LingoPapa is at home, they should be able to switch from mother minority language to father minority language. 

So what helped us at this stage? LittleLingo (4 years) went to Pakistan for nearly 2 weeks just with LingoPapa ( Urdu speaker). Luckily family situation back in the fatherland required LingoPapa's presence and he and the kid could travel. 
While there -  no English was allowed and LittleLingo spent all time with the family. To my almost horror, I was not able to fully understand anymore when I saw him speaking on Skype in Urdu...yes he got so good.

I was was wondering if he actually will be able to speak in my minority language when he is back. While he was recording voice notes for me, he started to make some little mistakes... however in the hindsight I believe that was down to the excitement and perhaps not having the active communicator on the other side of the screen.

So since LittleLingo's return, he started to speak to MiniLingo in Urdu (second/father minority language). It was a very natural transition -  for example when and Urdu song was on or he just spoken to his father. So some success there, but let see if this can be carried forward. 
For now we will try to boost the second minority language with more cartoons as LittleLingo has a fresh positive language experience from the brief visit to fatherland. 

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