English Accent

I mentioned earlier that Lilia has a Mancunian accent when she speaks English, but I have never written about accent in general.

Unfortunately, native speakers of her other three languages all say she has an accent.

Her German seems to be pretty much from the north, which is probably due to my influence.

Her Arabic comes with an accent that some of our friends describe as "german", others as "funny".

And her French has an English accent, our friends in France say.

Poor Lilia! But I am confident it'll work out ok.

Arabic Artifacts

4 weeks ago, the girls came back from Algeria.

Before they left for their 4 week holidays, Lilia used to practically never speak to Ines. We think that was because she wasn't sure what language to use.

Then, in those 4 weeks in Algeria, when they were in a pretty much monolingual environment, Lilia started to speak Arabic to Ines.

Now, after 1 week in the 2 weeks in the UK and 2 in France, she is still using Arabic.

I am very much looking forward to seeing whether her choice is final or not.

It's Official: BK1 speaks French

We have been in France for roughly 10 days and it shows: Lilia was sitting at a table alone, eating and blabbering in French.

We were surprised how good her French is. It only took a little bit of immersing her into it for her confidence to build up and now she feels perfectly at ease, it seems.

We're still a Minority

A park somewhere south of Paris, your standard Sunday. Kids play areas, walking, a lake. And poneys.

Lilia claims she wants to ride a poney. That roughly translates to "I might be afraid after 5m but let's shell out the money and try", so we do.

I lift Lilia onto the poney and say something like "So, hopp, schön festhalten". The french lady automatically assumes we do not speak French and turns to Souad to tell her to tell us how it works.

But no, dear lady, we do indeed understand you and we do speak French.

Still not the norm, but it might be one day, who knows.