OPOMLAH, or Balanced Minority

I am glad we are not living in an Arabic-, French- or German-speaking place. I think it is beneficial that the world around us is speaking yet another language.

Sometimes when we tell people about our language mix, the reaction includes concern: will the kids be able to learn all these languages? How will 3 "non-local" languages survive the influence of our English surroundings?

Those are good questions.

So far I think Lilia has proven that learning a lot of languages at the same time was easy-peasy for her. And I fully expect Ines to follow in her footsteps. It seems to me the human brain wants to learn languages at a young age.

We will see whether the kids will speak anything but English in the long run. My expectation is that they drop one or two other languages, but they will most likely still understand everything. And they will be able to pick the "lost languages" back up very quickly if they have to, I am sure.

Our approach on multilingual learning is a combination of OPOL and MLaH. We are basically doing "One Parent, one Minority Language at Home" (OPOMLAH).

Why do I like that?

Because it means our minority languages get fair treatment. Souad's and my mother tongues are minority languages and neither is preferred. I have the impression that this makes OPOL easier for the parents.

I also hope that because we have 4 languages floating around, the children will more easily grasp the concept of being multilingual. Rather than thinking "Papa speaks differently", they understand that a lot of people speak in a lot of different ways.

Here's hoping that understanding this will cause them not to drop any of their languages at all.

Family Language Diagram

I recently discovered and subsequently devoured "Multi Tongue Kids". Their setup is very similar to ours, only with different languages. I very much liked the "Family Language Diagram" on the blog, so I did one for us as well.

I intend to update this regularly because part of the magic is that it changes all the time!

I will also try to make a couple of those depicting the past (when BK1 started to speak, before BK2 was around, after 4 weeks in Algiers, and so on). Should look good as a movie :-)

One thing to note in this first diagram is the absence of English. While we all speak English, we do not use it in house. My guess is that it'll creep into the picture now that BK1 is in school.

The other interesting aspect: Souad speaks two languages. I have  always thought of it as one ("that funny mix they speak in the Maghreb countries"), but BK1 is clearly not agreeing. Since we spent a lot of time in France this summer, she has become so much better and she now doesn't mix French and Arabic anymore.

[Update] Souad rightly points out that although Ines uses words from all three languages, she doesn't really "speak any of those languages" yet. So I changed the diagram.

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.

Sprache und Kultur

Meine Tochter spricht Deutsch, oder zumindest lernt sie es, wie das bei Kleinkindern eben so ist. Ist sie deswegen automatisch "Deutsch", was auch immer das genau heissen mag?

Die Antwort lautet natürlich: Nein, ist sie nicht.

Am auffälligsten dürften die Namen im Kinderprogramm sein: "Bob der Baumeister" kennt Lilia nicht, wohl aber "Bob the Builder". Solange die Namen so ähnlich sind, dürfte sie das auch noch verstehen, aber wenn sie mal eines Tages mit einem in Deutschland aufgewachsenen Kind über die Ducks aus Entenhausen redet, dann wird sie erstmal nicht wissen, wovon die Rede ist.

So gesehen ist meine Tochter eine Engländerin.