Question on bilingual language acquisition from non-native speaker

[Marilyn Vihman]

Dear Kristin,

I can't answer your 'should I' question, since a lot of factors enter  
into the practical Q as to whether you will want to raise a child  
bilingually. (Contrary to the previous email, bilingual learners don't  
actually 'end up a lot smarter'; they do better on certain types of  
tasks, usually involving attention control - as shown by many  
Bialystok studies: see Bialystok's 2001 book, for example, or check  
her website.)

What I can say is that as a non-native speaker of Estonian who learned  
the language from her Estonian spouse, at a time when Estonia was  
still an occupied country, we made the family decision to raise our  
children speaking Estonian in the home (in N. California, so a  
monolingual  English community) - it does take effort and perseverance  
- and both our now adult children are completely at home in both  
English and Estonian. So if your partner is a native speaker, it  
definitely can be done. If both are non-native and the community is  
using a different language - maybe your L1 - it will be a lot harder,  
and I would judge the chances of success to be small (where success  
means that the children by their teen years are fluent enough in both  
languages to be able to make their own choice as to whether to  
maintain both or not).

best wishes,

marilyn vihman

On 10 Dec 2008, at 11:04, Isenthia wrote:

>
> Dear All,
>
> I'm not entirely sure whether this is the right place to pose my
> question. However, a friend of mine suggested I'd try here to get some
> information on the following issue.
>
> I'd like to know whether there are any studies investigating the
> question of whether or not a non-native speaker of a language (with
> fairly high competency) should try and raise his child bilingually
> nevertheless. I'm simply interested in views on that question.
>
> I'd be very happy if you could help me with suggestions or references
> on this.
>
> Thanks a lot.
>
> Best,
> Kristin
> >


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