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Hi my 2 and a half year old daughter is currently living in Botswana and she is speaking both Setswana and English. She speaks setswana to her young relatives after pre-school when playing. At the pre school the teachers speak to her mostly in english. In the house her mother speaks to her in english mostly and sometimes setswana I also talk to her in both languages. My concern is that she seems to be a little bit behind english kids her own age in speaking english and a little bit behind in speaking setswana when compared to a motswana child who is only conversing in setswana. So will she catch up is my question and should I do things differently. I have no experience in growing up bilingual so maybe there is no problem. I would like some reassurance from people who have been brought up bilingual or have an elder bilingual child. Any tips so that my daughter will have the gift of evetually being multilingual.

My dad is a psychologist who specializes in child development, and when I asked him this question (earlier this year for a friend of mine) he said it was normal for a child who was growing up bi-lingual to be slightly behind in both languages at a very young age, but that they should catch up with both languages quickly. In the long run, there are only advantages to your child for being bi-lingual, and if I understood what my dad was saying correctly, by the time they are school age (like...ready to start real school) bilingual children shoulod be at the approximately the same level as other children the same age.

hi there

I agree with meganicka. I grew up in a Cantonese -speaking household while attending school in english (canada). I was probably slightly behind in english compared to the rest of the kids only because I was learning another langauge as well. However -- when I got to elementary school, I was on par with the rest and also took on french immersion and japanese language courses all at the same time. I don't think you need to worry -- it is definitely beneficial for your child to learn more than 1 language at such a young age...it also helps them with further language-learning skills should they want to take on a 3rd, 4th etc language (at least in my opinion)

As the other posters have said, I think she will catch up eventually. I grew up speaking 4 different dialects of Chinese with my family and learned Malay and English in school. I remember mixing up some words in the Chinese dialects because they sounded the similar but eventually I figured it out. Being multilingual is definitely a good thing for your daughter.

It's brilliant to grow up bilingual and your kid will catch up soon and perhaps even have a better capacity for learning new languages later on (does anyone known about this?)

My hubby's two oldest nieces grew up in Israel with a Rusian father and an English mother and not only learned 3 languages, but 3 alphabets. They did OK.

I don't know if it's true of everyone, but from personal experience I find it easier to pick up new languages than most of my (American monolingual) friends do. Mind you I haven't really made the effort to be fluent in any new ones, but I have always picked up a fair amount of foreign languages when I travel somewhere new so I can get around without too much problem.

We are raising a child who is bilingual ( she's now 5) and it is wonderful ,but its good to be fully informed on this and how best to do it.Heres a good site with books about raising bilingual kids that will help a lot:
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

Its a little trickier than most know and there are some things that you can do to help your child.She will have a dominant language which will be the one usually that is used most in the culture she is in.Its good to have a method ( like only speaking English at home or one parent speak in one language and another only speaking in the other etc) and be consistant with it.Also when she begins to read ,its best to have her start reading in her most dominant language.

The more she is exposed to the languages the more she will be fluent.Also languages really vary on difficulty to learn and value.Since English is a much more used language on the planet ,the most dominant at the moment,I would make sure her English stays strong and probably would prefer it to be the dominant one in your case since I have never heard of the second language.Now if she is going to live her whole life where the second language is the dominant one ,then she will need that strong as well.If she will later go back to an English dominated culture ,you will need to make sure that it stays strong.I know UK families who have moved to Spain and their childrens native English became so poor that they were at a great disadvantage when they returned to UK.

Your child is young yet and it will keep changing.My child is a very ,very verbose kind ( started talking bilingually at 6m and hasn't stopped since ) but surprizingly was more dominant in Spanish at first even tho she heard it much less.( Spanish is an easier language). I always spoke to her in English and her dad always spoke to her in Spanish until she was 2.5.( My husbands spanish is quite limited next to his english ,so it got to hard at that point so we started hiring native speakers to babysit for her exposure etc).Most bilinguals speak later than other children because they are processing 2 systems,but it is great for their growing brains in more ways than just language.( They start understanding abstact thinking earlier etc).

To do it well it really takes conscious work.It is best to have the child spend time in countries where each language is dominant on a regular basis.We are attempting to keep my childs 2 fluent languages both very strong as they are both dominant languages on the planet ( Spanish and English).She actually started as a trilingual ( Mandarin chinese) but since we do not speak it and it takes a lot to maintain a language ,we decided to let that one go for now,tho her exposure will help a lot when we spend time in China.( There is a mandarin international school nearby where we would have sent her ,but decided against it for now due to our long RTW trip).My child loves languages so knows some of quite a few and we will add French and greek and latin to the mix in deeper ways soon ( after she becomes fully dominant spanish english bilingual,biliterate with some extended living in Spain).

Kids learn languages very fast when young because thier brains are wired for it.The bad news is they can lose them just as fast.It takes continual work and constant exposure and use of a language to keep it up.If you took her away from her second language now ,she would soon forget it.Many kids here are raised in homes of another language and never get more than a bit receptive at best.One must continually use a language to keep it strong and probably even more so with kids.

If you want her to be truly a fluent bilingual child it will take much more work and maintainance than most people realize.It is true that it is easier to learn other languages once you have more than one down ( if one has 3 down ,its easier still since its about understanding decoding and 3 systems down gives one advantages).

HTH. I agree with the other posters that you are giving your child a great gift as we learn so much about other cultures when we learn the language.

Thanks for the tips WT I had a feeling that there was more to it than meets the eye or ear in this case. I will definately gem up with some text books. A book I have read that has help me understand learning language better is The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker I recommend anyone faced with learning a language should read this excellent book before they embark on learning a foriegn language.

I highly recommend Steven Pinker's book too. He's a brilliant neurolinguist. He explains Chomsky better (in various senses of the word) than Chomsky can explain himself sometimes, and the book is very interesting and insightful.

When I was a kid I was fluently bilingual, and there was a period when it was difficult to understand my blather unless you were Chinese-English bilingual too since I would do massive amounts of codeswitching. In fact, until I became a linguistics major, it never really occured to me that Chinese and English were very different languages.

Ever since I was a kid though, teachers and aptitude tests agreed that I had very strong English verbal skills. My Chinese suffered though; like someone pointed out, you have to push the kid to speak the other language, and by the time I was a teen I was going through an identity crisis phase and basically stopped speaking the language. I speak Chinese again now though, and after several years of studying, I'm now fluent in French, and generally have a good ear for languages. I think this is because I spoke two languages as a kid. When I was studying in Finland, people would note that people who grew up natively bilingual (in this case, Swedish and Finnish) would have a smaller vocabulary in both languages, in that they knew less synonyms for a word. But at what expense? Everyone I knew in Finland was at least fluently trilingual, many were quatrilingual. You didn't even notice that they used fewer synonyms for the same thing (I'm not even sure that was true, or just popular belief). People who are natively bilingual are good at picking up more languages.

I have a bilingual daughter, nine, English and Polish. I agree that it is best not to mix the two languages involved but I have to say that it is really difficult for me to do this - when everyone around for example is speaking Polish it seems artificial and socially awkward to speak to the child in a different langauge the others don't understand. In our family we tend to mix the two languages freely, and I do think that while there are no problems with the dominant Polish the English, although clearly a variant of native, is maybe not as good as it could be. With my second daughter (6 months) I am making a more concerted effort to speak only English to her, and as much as possible, having English radio on etc.
Good luck!