The Language Explosion

Cloudscome said she was interested in Small Sun's language acquisition so I thought I'd write a little something about that.

In our house I speak English nearly all the time with the kids. The Captain speaks ONLY Dutch with them. Our family often speaks Dutch when we are out in public because it gives privacy to our conversations, and it makes me look really cool in front of my friends. Ha.

The week before we went to Holland Small Sun was gaining a lot of new words. He also started putting some words together, which he hadn't really done before.

In Holland he was hearing a lot of new words and he was repeating everything over and over. Of course our family was excited that he could say things in Dutch so they kept encouraging him, which made him use Dutch words even more. By the end of the week he was using sentences like "Oma, auto, bye bye" which described Grandma getting in her car and us saying "bye bye" and waving.

In school (I studied child development) we learned that children raised in bilingual households "code mix" when they are learning to speak. That is, they use words from both languages, sometimes in the same sentence. Children as young as two years old begin to understand that the two languages are separate, at which point they "code switch", speaking the appropriate language to the appropriate parent, for example.

Small Sun has been behind his peers in language acquisition and I've long thought that our bilingual household might have something to do with it. He is learning two words for everything, and hearing two different languages, each with a unique set of rules. First I saw a leap ahead in his English language acquisition, and then a rocket ahead with his Dutch. He is still code mixing most of the time, but at least once he asked me first "auto?" and then repeated "car?".

I am always amazed when the Captain is carrying on a conversation with Small Sun in Dutch, using vocabulary that I don't know. I am amazed at how rapidly vocabulary is gained. Small Sun is getting in weeks what I have worked years to gain.

Comments

[cloudscome]

This is fascinating. I hope you are keeping close records of all that he is learning, just for your own interest. I didn't realize your family spoke that much Dutch on a daily basis and I think it's great!

[James]

Hey, A. Not sure if you can see comments from historical posts. If not, no worries. :) I read this and remembered that my friend Dave Durham remarked similarly. Becky spoke English to their children while he spoke French. His children, when young, were slow with language acquisition, but had significant breakthroughs at various points (dependant on child). Now, all are fully fluent multi-lingually (German, French, Spanish, and English). Hope this affirms your thoughts about Small Sun.