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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Siblings' language: The fight with the killer language continues...

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Just to recap - in our family we speak THREE languages on daily basis. LingoPapa speaks Urdu with kids, LingoMama in Czech and language of the community is English. ( Parents also speak mostly English with each other).

We have successfully established communication channels with the children in the desired languages. This means kiddos only speak to me in my minority language and different minority language with their father.

But what started to happen as the children grow ....killer language crept in!!! We noticed that when out of earshot, LittleLingo (4 years old at the time of writing) speaks to his little brother in English (majority language). Sometimes, we had a bizarre feeling when we heard two two "English" kids playing in the living room. I mean who are these people? Right.


As we live in English speaking country, LingoPapa and I concurred that we might want to encourage minority languages at home. The reasons for this are:

 1) We would like the kids to learn as much of the minority languages as they can in natural way.

 2) Facilitation of being at ease with the minority languages. 

 3) Fighting the killer language!

 4) Increase the exposure to minority languages. 

So, how did we achieve it? As LittleLingo usually just reached for English when playing with his brother, we keep asking him to HELP US.

Yes, to HELP US. We kindly asked LittleLingo to speak either minority language to MiniLingo. We gave him the following reasoning:

"Your little bother is small and he needs to learn, he need help with [insert a minority language]. Can you be the teacher?[Insert a majority language] is easy and he will learn it by himself. "

LittleLingo took the bait almost immediately. We offer praise to the "teaching" child and also offer  recognition of the "pupil's" progress. Regularly!!! 

At the moment we have great success with the minority language of the parent who stays at home. We now work on the switch into father's minority language when he gets home at the end of the day. Read about how this is going and what strategies we have tried in the next post.

What language do your children speak with each other?



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