If you are teaching your young kid two languages?

Question

If you speak to your kid in two languages as they grow up (ex: Spanish and English), and give them both pretty close to equal time, will they speak Spanish with a Spanish accent as they have heard it from you or your partner and English with an English accent as they have heard it? Or will they develop one first or stronger and speak the other with that accent? Did that make any sense at all? Haha.

Well raising a child is a lot of work, I agree with you there, but I think it's really important to have your kids grow up with at least two languages. I wish I would have grown up bilingual, a lot less work for them when they grow up! It is MUCH harder to learn it when you are older.

Answer 1

Do not be influenced by the Answer denigrating the teaching of multiple languages. In the 1920s through the 1940s charlatans who counseled that teaching a kid a second language was "damaging" to his/her psyche and learning ability, and by the way "unamerican". Several states passed laws against teaching languages to elementary-school age kids which the Supreme Court struck down: Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923); Bartels v. Iowa, 262 U.S. 404 (1923).

The fact is that any child of normal intelligence can learn two or three languages as a toddler. (You might want to see the Q/A below about the "most languages" spoken: 78 by a single person.) When our youngest was in elementary school in Geneva, there was a Downs Syndrome kid in her class who spoke French, Italian and some English. Our kids all went to French lycées, which raises another point you asked:

Our middle daughter is engaged to a French man who lives in Paris. He says that two of our children speak French with no trace of any English accent; these are not the two who speak French the best. The other two have a very slight, difficult to discern, accent of something-or-other. Do not be concerned about accents. They are not fixed until adolescence; and mimicking ability (and selection of a target accent to mimic) varies by child. One of our daughters can switch flawlessly -- like many actresses -- between an English and an American accent. (She is in India right now attending a wedding; I wonder if she'll come back with a high-caste Indian accent and mannerisms!)

Having rasied kids to be bilingual, I watched their experience closely as well as that of others' kids. The first year a child is exposed to language he or she learns to listen to it. This is true especially if sent to kindergarten or 1st or 2nd grade as a non-speaker of the language. Almost a year to the day, the child will start to speak. A number of parents felt the experiment had failed at the end of the first year and put their kids in, say, an English-language school. This was exactly the wrong time to "admit failure".

Our son has married a girl who has Argentine parents and speaks Spanish. They hope to raise their kids as trilingual, and send them to a lycée near where they live.

The daughter of a friend of ours is married to a Japanese. They live near the Japanese School in London and will send their 4 kids there. The kids are already bilingual.

Note the spate of articles recently in the NY Times and elsewhere about all the middle class American families trying to have their kids educated in Chinese.

Good luck. Bon courage.

Answer 2

I teach ESL, and from experience, kids generally pick up both languages easily if spoken to in those languages often. I mean, they don't necessarily choose one over the other, but it's very likely that they would feel more comfortable speaking one over the other. The younger they start, the less likely they'll have an accent. Kids who hear and speak both languages from birth (or even as just young children) tend not to have an accent when speaking that language. I hope that made sense. Most of my students (grades K-4) do not have accents when speaking English, and are completely fluent in their native languages (with no accent, either).

Answer 3

It all has to do with the child's exposure to language. Most adults don't realize it; but even newborn babies are listening to language. Just because the mom and dad may only talk to the baby in cooing, childish tones and use very limited vocabulary, the baby still hears regular conversation amongst adults. Humans are born with the innate ability to learn language, but it doesn't have to be just one. The baby has to, above all, hear the language being used. But hearing isn't enough. He or she must apply the language just as often as the other language he or she is learning. Otherwise, the language will not stick. Take, for instance, a Mexican family whose kid is born in America. If the parents were to speak nothing but Spanish and then put their kid into an English-speaking school, the kid would be almost perfectly fluent in Spanish and English. The only thing is that the kid will not know the intricate grammar of Spanish like he will know of English. Rather, he will be able to speak Spanish fluently, but may still have a hard time later on in a Spanish class where grammar is heavily worked on.

Answer 4

Probably English since it is the universal language and then the other one would be Spanish. I’ll give equal time for both languages but not necessarily sounding such (eg. so Spanish accent). The basics are far more important than the accent because gradually the accent will be acquired and learned from continuous practice of the language.

Answer 5

yes, they will. My brother raised his kids in a true bilingual house, and they speak both languages without any accent. That is, the Spanish sounds like Spanish, and the English sounds like English.

Answer 6

I learned two languages from my parents: Japanese and English.
Now, i am completely bilingual and speak both languages fluently.

I believe that both languages will equally be the same. If the kid learns both languages equally, then he/she should be able to speak it equally.

For the accent, the kid should also be able to master both languages; though might take some time. Right now, as a teenager, I am able to speak both Japanese and English with perfect accent.

Answer 7

I'm in a similar situation. I grew up speaking English with my Dad and Portuguese with my Mom. Of course I live in America so I learned to speak fluent English though my Portuguese isn't great and I throw in a bunch of English words into my sentences. If I were you I'd speak Spanish only in the home and let them learn English in school. Or vice versa if you live in a spanish speaking country.

Answer 8

My kids speak English with my accent and French with (more or less) my husband's accent. (We have pretty much the same accent in English, quite a different one in French (ie: mine sucks).)

I know some people here in Switzerland (at least two different families) who have American mom and Swiss dad, the dad always speaks to the mom and sometimes or always to the kids in English--the kids speak English well but do have a Swiss accent. If it's the dad who speaks English, the kids don't speak English particularly well.

But I definitely think it's a tribute to my husband's involvement as a parent that my kids speak French as well as they do. (We did have the advantage of a pretty balanced bilingual environment (Montreal) until they were 5 and 2.) My older daughter used to switch between a European French accent (family) and Quebec French (at kindergarten) but she has lost the Quebec accent.

EDIT: To clarify, I have always spoken only English with my kids and my husband always French. We speak English together. We moved to the German part of Switzerland five years ago and now the kids speak German at school and with friends. (Mostly standard German at school, always Swiss-German with friends.)

Answer 9

I was raised with just English. But self taught Spanish and now learning Hebrew & Chinese. Chinese is tough!!! But I don't have an accent like Mexicans do. So I sound like a white American using Spanish words.

I try with Hebrew to sound like them because they have hard letters and hard sounds but I have a difficult time rolling my Rs. My son is good at Spanish. They teach him at school since 5 yrs old and I do more sentence structures with him at home. We usually speak English at home but sometimes he'll want to just speak Spanish on a Saturday. It's fun!

Answer 10

Children can pick up many languages fautlessly, which adults CAN'T do.

IT DOES NOT CONFUSE THEM

I knew a French woman who married a Canadian and they were living in Mexico. The mom spoke to the kid in French, the dad in English and the kid (7 years old) spoke French, English and Spanish like a pro.

No sweat.