MY daughter’s first words were in French; “lait” for her milk bottle and “spaghetti bye-bye” for her big brother’s lunch box. That was five years ago now, and it used to puzzle me. How come she started off in French, and not in Norwegian, my mother tongue?
I imagined having talked to her in Norwegian during the pregnancy, and afterwards, while changing nappies or breastfeeding, but it seemed she had not picked up anything, or maybe she wasn’t interested. I felt betrayed that she would chose my husband’s language over mine (after all, I was the one who had breastfed her!), although it must have seemed logical to her; it was the common language she heard around the house, it’s what my husband and I spoke to each other, and it’s the language she would use with her big brother. I was frankly quite scared that she would never learn to speak Norwegian, especially since she started kindergarten at only 18 months old (meaning that my influence on her language learning diminished hugely). I tried talking to her in Norwegian and she would stubbornly answer in French.
Until we moved to Bulgaria. She was nearly four years old when we came here, and Bulgaria had a kind of de-blocking effect on her language skills. It was as if she was trying out this weird language she heard around her, but when she opened her mouth, out came the Norwegian that she had never spoken; all the words she had just stacked away for years in the back of her head! I was amazed! She was speaking Norwegian with no hesitation, sometimes searching for words, but amazingly at ease playing and talking on the phone with friends and family far away. It was as if a gate lock had been opened and the words were pouring out. Now it’s me who’s the lazy one, and my husband will tell me to stop answering her in French when she is actually speaking Norwegian to me!
In a bilingual home, there are no language barriers, for good and bad. The bad part being that there are no secret languages to use between the adults of the house! Our son quickly understood the need to learn English, which used to be the secret language between my husband and me.
There seems to be no limit as to how many languages a child can pick up. I’ve heard stories of children speaking seven different languages, each one of them with different people. When grandma comes along the child knows when to switch from French to Dutch, and then over to German again when it’s the other grandmother, for example. The trick is to be consistent, to keep to one language per person that the child relates to, and not to move around between different languages. I would for example not speak English to my daughter at the age she is now, since it is not my mother tongue, and it might confuse her. A child will associate the language with the person speaking a certain language. But I do speak to my son in English now and then.
In bilingual Canada (some would argue the truth of this bilingualism), when I was doing my BA at an English-language university, many so-called bilingual students couldn’t write in either English or French very well, they seemed to be lost somewhere in between the two languages. They spoke fluent French and English, but grammar and writing skills were a disaster – in both languages. Which is why I think it is more important to learn one written language well, instead of two or three to a mediocre level.
When you’ve got a tiny language like Norwegian you need to work very hard on the consistency part, it’s not like French or German or Spanish, where you might be able to find schools in these languages, as well as newspapers, TV shows and children’s books, anywhere on the globe. When you speak a tiny language, you become nationalistic, not out of pride, but out of necessity.
Nevertheless, I will never force my oldest child to learn written Norwegian. What I’ve become very good at, is to ask family to give children’s stories and books on audio CDs, so that the kids always listen to Norwegian.
What about when the kids correct the adults?We were at Baba’s house – the mother-in-law of a friend of mine. My friend was explaining what we had done that day, and as far as I could understand, Baba kind of got the idea. But her grandchild, who is bilingual Bulgarian-Norwegian, was fast to correct her mother. “You should say so-and-so. You should use past tense, Mom!” Yeah, fun being corrected by your 10-year-old! But, believe it or not, this girl 10 months ago had never written in Bulgarian, and now she has one of the best grades in her class in Bulgarian this year. Kids are truly amazing!
One last thing before I leave you for this week; I remember when my son was two years old and we had just moved back to Norway (I promise I won’t talk about Norway next time), he spoke French only, and I had a talk with the kindergarten he was going to start in. They were so nervous. He didn’t speak Norwegian, they didn’t speak French; how would this go? After two weeks, the “camions” (trucks) and “autos” (cars) were switched to “lastebil” and “bil” without any effort. After he had the most essential and basic things in life translated, he was ready to take on the world. Or, at least the kindergarten.