Friday 10 December 2010

Phone Calls

BK2 was holding her yellow plastic telephone and making calls.

I love how serious she is about it. She tells me who she is currently on the phone with then proceeds to perfectly emulate a phone call: "yes... yes... ah... no... I'm busy... yes... ok... ok... I'm playing puzzle with daddy, yes..." and so on for ages. Eventually she'll hang up and call someone else. Adorable.

She copies our behaviour on the phone really well. And it probably helps that she speaks to her grandparents mainly via skype and phone.

Now here's one more sign that English is the number one language in her head: her calls with English people take a lot longer than others. And she calls them more often.

Her preferred person to call currently is our friend Fiona. I would say that she spends more time "on the phone" with Fiona than all other people combined!

Now the Babelmum speaks with Fiona regularly and she thinks that explains it, but I'm not so sure. I think it is because BK2 knows a lot of things to say in English.

Also, since her conversations seem to almost make sense, I guess she is imagining the other side and then answering to what she just imagined. It might just be that she feels more at ease imagining stuff in English.

Or maybe I'm just making things up now.

Funny enough this goes against the current trend towards German that BK1 & BK2 show. Since the birth of BK3 a month ago we had family over twice from Germany so they had a lot of exposure and it shows.

2 comments:

  1. hi, I was looking in internet for reading experiences of other mothers with more than 2 languages to deal with in raising kids and when I saw your diagram I smiled from ear to ear, now I know its not just my wishful thinking but it is possible to really keep on such a system! (i'm italian, my husband is polish, we talk to each other in english and in our own mothertongues to our daughter that born 2 months ago in france, were we are likely to keep living for the next 5 years)

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  2. Ah, you've got an excellent mix of languages there! I'm sure your daughter will keep amazing you with her language skills.

    You should blog about it, really ;-)

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