a question about multilingual babies

[Bruno]

Hmmm, as for references, some of the best names in research of
bilingualism have already been put forward. You know, my two cents,
from reading the literature, investigating first language acquisition,
having been raised simultaneous bilingual, and multilingual
sequentially, and having a multilingual situation at home now, is that
your child will be most fluent in whatever language they speak in most
of the time. That will ALMOST ALWAYS be (in my opinion), the community
language (seemingly the 4th language you're not mentioning). That is,
the language of their peers (friends and foes alike :-) ). Your child
will have varying degrees of fluency in the other languages, and will
most likely be able to understand those languages almost perfectly if
he/she keeps hearing them, even if the child ends up being quite
unable to produce languages 1, 2, and 3. Moreover, I am afraid how
much exposure your child gets before going to school may not matter as
much, since attrition and loss at a very early age can happen in a
matter of mere months.
I would humbly put forth the following suggestion: you and your
partner need to establish some clear goals for your child in terms of
language proficiency. You will likely have to consider where you will
be throughout your child's childhood, as well as how important each
language is likely to be in the future FROM YOUR CHILD's perspective.
If it is absolutely essential, or even highly desirable, that your
child SPEAK languages 1, 2, or 3 (I am not sure about English in your
case), then that will require a lot of effort on your part. In
particular, it will require exposing your child to contexts where his/
her speaking those languages is communicationally, socially, and
emotionally adequate (that is, for example, travel abroad to family,
play dates with friends who do not speak their community language,
etc.) HARD to do, not impossible.

Bruno Estigarribia
UNC-Chapel Hill


On May 8, 1:48 pm, "Tamar & Yves" <tama... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
> Our 10 months old son is exposed to 3 languages at home ( each one of
> us is speaking to him his mother- tongue, and we speak English between
> us) and to a 4th one outside.
>
> Soon he will be starting Nursery, and we were wondering what language
> it should be in. Is it better to expose him simultaneously to all 4
> languages or should we do it gradually over the first few years of his
> life (It's possible to sign him up to a nursery in my husnband's
> mother tongue (2)/ english (3)/ bi lingual (enviroment+English)(4))
>
> We don't want language acquisition to be too much of a burden on him,
> and not sure how many languages he can learn at once.
>
> We are aware of the large number of factors affecting the answer, but
> does anyone know or refer us to research done on the specific issues
> of (i) number of languages babies can learn and its implication on
> their emotional state; and (ii) Is it better to expose a baby to those
> languages simultaneously or gradually over the first few years of his
> life.
>
> Thanks,
> Tamar & Yves

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