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Showing posts with the label multilingual family

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 ba...
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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 ba...
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Church and white slippers - how a 4 year old decodes his languages

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What does a church and a pair of white slippers have in common? Hmmm, let me see... I did not know that they do but they actually do :) Today Little Lingo while riding his bike asked - 'Mami??? What is a chapel?' We just walked past the Salvation Army building so I turned to him and said: "Well, in English chapel is a part of a church building... and in Urdu "chapl" چپل  means a slipper". Little Lingo seemed satisfied with the answer and cycled on. After a while he rode back to me and said: 'So mami, it means that I was born in White Slipper?' ( He actually said it in his 3rd language which is Czech - "Bílý pantofel") And I had to agree; 'Yes indeed, Little Lingo, you were born in White Slipper/ Bílý Pantofel...yes, because you were born in Whitechapel hospital in East London.' And this is actually only one example. I have noticed that our children that we try to raise with more languages actually show the ability to d...
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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 fam...
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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...
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