Had you asked me in my mid-20s who I saw myself marrying, I never in a million years would have said a Polish guy who I met in Italy. Add to that a two-year, across-the-world relationship with Italian as the primary and only language. I barely spoke conversational Italian when I met my husband, much less his native language of Polish. Thankfully he had been living and working in Italy for several years so he was an experienced and patient teacher.
Here we are in present day Shoreline, married almost five years and the very happy parents of a two and a half year old daughter. While my husband now has a great command of the English language, Italian is still the language we speak in our home as a family. I, ashamedly, have still not learned much Polish.
Our hope is to raise a bilingual child. Maybe one day, she’ll even be trilingual if we can work Polish into the mix. For now, she understands both Italian and English and speaks about 90% English and 10% Italian. If her daddy is home she tends to use more Italian as he is much more consistent than I am about speaking only in Italian to her.
This process of using more than one language to raise our daughter (and having our primary household language be one that is not native to my husband or myself) has been a fascinating, fulfilling and at times, confusing, process.
When our daughter was a newborn, I was adamant that she learn the three languages spoken between my husband and me. My husband, however, felt overwhelmed by the prospect of speaking only Polish to her, as he is the sole Polish speaker of the house. I think he also had many fears about overwhelming our precious little girl with too many languages. While I felt she could handle it, as it would be her “normal” and she wouldn’t know any different, I respected his perspective.
I’ve always heard that if you want your child to speak more than one language you must implement a very rigid and consistent structure around the languages. For example, one parent speaks only language A, while the other parent only speaks language B. Or as is our case, we should only speak Italian in the home and let our daughter learn English via relatives, friends and the “outside” world. We have friends who speak three languages. The mom only speaks Italian to their children, while the father only speaks Spanish. The parents speak English only to each other. Their children attend a Spanish immersion daycare in Seattle. English, in a sense will be their third language. This is the method that is working for their family.
What I have learned from personal experience is that the rigidity isn’t as important as the effort and what works for your individual situation and family. Within the last six months I found a wonderful website called, www.multilingualliving.com which has been an amazing and supportive resource for raising a multilingual child. This website helped me to embrace the many different avenues of raising a child in more than one language and that the rules and definitions are a lot more gray than black and white. Another great resource is a book called, “Bilingual: Life and Reality” by François Grosjean. This wonderful book challenges some of the common attitudes about what bilingualism means.
Watching the evolution of a child’s language skills is such a fascinating process in and of itself. Watching our child grow up speaking more than one language is so gratifying and has only proven to me that our little ones are capable of so much more than we realize. I am excited to see how this journey progresses, what more it has to teach us, and how her language skills will contribute to her life experience and the world around her.