By Andréanne Langevin
4:45 PM, rushing to pick up my 2-year-old from daycare. I am just in time again, phew! I walk in and my son immediately sees me among the parents crowded at the entrance. He runs and jumps straight into my arms. The best feeling. After a comforting hug, he says, almost in a frenzy: “mul, mul, mul! 물, 물, 물 ” (water, water, water). I then turn to Serge, his caretaker, and ask him to hand me a glass of water. Taeho grabs it from my hands as if he had been stranded in the desert for a week. This happens almost every week. My son had been thirsty and no one could answer his need, no one understood. My heart aches. How long had he been asking for water? One hour, two?
The issue is that my son is not able to decipher between languages yet. At home we speak three: French, Korean and English. When our son speaks at home, we get very creative simple sentences and find it perfectly adorable. However, when he is out and about and interacts with other adults, our baby is constantly frustrated. We tried explaining to him how Grand-Maman speaks French, Hal-mo-ni 할머니 speaks Korean, and his best friend the neighbour only understands English. We have not been very successful thus far. We are hoping it sorts itself out soon, at least for Taeho’s safety and to have his basic needs met.
As a family, we seem to have developed our own principles of code-switching (Van Herk, 2012, p.130) in order to accommodate our baby’s developing language. Taeho seems to pick up words in both languages, and shows no preference for either at this point. When he has acquired one new word, he seems to stick to the language he acquired it in first. Hence, how our family talks sounds probably like we are from another planet: Taeho nyam nyam 냠냠fini kkut 끝? Oma do 엄마도, Peppa Pig pogo 보고 shipa 싶어 encore. Ton livre Brown Bear yogi saw 여깄어.
King and Lanza (2017), would simply define our family as having a “flexible language policy”. They also explain how “children in multilingual, transnational families mobilize their developing linguistic repertoires to assert personal agency [which in turn becomes] conducive to successful maintenance of the so-called “home,” “community,” or “minority” language. Reading this as a parent is very reassuring. I truly hope that all our efforts help our son in maintaining his many languages and then transmitting them to his family one day.
However, for now, I decided to give the daycare a little “Taeho lexicon”… just to be on the safe side…
References
King, K., & Lanza, E. (2017). Ideology, agency, and imagination in multilingual families: An introduction. International Journal of Bilingualism, 136700691668490, 136700691668490-136700691668490. doi:10.1177/1367006916684907
Van Herk, Gerard. (2012). What is sociolinguistics? Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
This is very interesting. I have friends who have a child who is also growing up in a trilingual environment and his family is worried that his speech development is progressing a little more slowly. They are not sure if it’s because of prematurity or the linguistic environment. Have you ever experienced anything like that?
-Brian
As far as I know, the research does not support the idea that language development is slowed down when children acquire three (or more!) languages simultaneously. The phenomenon of a child having only one word for something basic like “water” is typically a very short-lived one, so Andréanne, I don’t think you should worry too much. At that young age, a child’s vocabulary is expanding rapidly, and across children early vocabulary sizes are comparable and grow in comparable ways. When Taeho’s vocabulary has grown a bit, it will comfortably hold “mul,” “eau” and “water” all at the same time. I bet you’ll be able to reassure us on that point before the end of the course! The important thing is for the language input and interaction in all three languages to be consistently rich, varied and age-appropriate, with caregivers the child knows well and is attached to. It’s a very magical process to observe unfolding.
I remember learning in my psych 101 class that children development are not the same, they go to different stages but not at the same time they all have their own rhythm. Why this is not the same for language.