Hi!
My mother told me she was advised by her nurses/doctors in Germany to only speak German to me as a child, so to not “confuse me”. My parents did not heed this advice and I grew up bilingually, speaking one language to my dad, and another to my mother.
In Poland it was never an issue – nobody cared if I spoke German or not in the negative sense, and it was only seen as a positive, extra skill to have.
I have since encountered examples of this not being so uncommon in Germany – many families only choose to speak German to their kids, and they felt it game them better chances in life if they grew up only speaking German.
Which is odd, considering that knowing more than language is an asset for employers.
I understand for some it comes naturally, and makes sense if the parent doesn’t have that much connection to the other place, but I wonder how often it is something that the parents are “encouraged” to do, rather than just something that happens spontaneously.
13 comments
Some doctors/teachers advices this but most agree that having 2 languages is a real chance.
I’m a teacher and one of my student really struggle in class because he only speaks chinese (mandarin ) at home. But he is only in kindergarten, we help him a bit more than others but I would never tell his parents to stop talking chinese to him. Yes he struggle with vocabulary and some grammatical thing (like feminin/masculin) but he has time to improve and the benefits of speaking 2 languages is great. He never confuses 2 languages.
My own great grand parents were spanish, when they arrived in France they only talked french to my grandfather since “we’re in France, we do as french now”. So my grandfather, then my father and I can’t speak spanish. It’s a pity..
I made the opposite experience. The usual opinion is that parents should speak to their children in their mother tongue as to not accustom them to wrong grammar and pronunciation. The children learn the local language in kindergarten anyway.
My wife speaks only Polish to my daughter. I speak German.
I have never heard of someone being discouraged from teaching their children a second language here. Several of my friends are also bilingual, and they haven’t had issues from that either. Most people view it as a handy thing.
The closest thing I can think of is that people want immigrants amd their children to learn Danish. And I agree that they should learn it, but that isn’t mutually exclusive with learning another. Sadly, we do have some rather unreasonable people that almost expect immigrants to be perfectly fluent from day one, and get angry, when they are not
My dad is Bosnian and my mother is French. My father has always spoken Bosnian with me and my mother always French. We lived in France until I was 5 years old and went to the Netherlands. Didn’t change the fact though that I spoke with my parents in their mother language. To be honest, this is the case for all my friends with an immigrant background. I think it’s a good thing but the point some people make is that people don’t integrate well because of the language barrier. Personally, I think that’s bullshit.
Oh yes, in France this happens to this day. And I have many other stories of French ‘specialists’ and ‘teachers’ (and I use these terms lightly) telling parents to not speak French languages (Occitan, Breton, Basque, Alsatian etc), to scare them into only raising their children as good little monolingual French kids. Let me quote from a thread that I made on /r/France about this, from 2020. In the 21st century:
>Ma fille est née en France, et j’ai parlé ma langue maternelle (le russe) avec elle depuis sa naissance. On a eu beaucoup d’incompréhension de la part des specialistes de la petite enfance/enseignants, parce que les enfants polyglottes se mettent fréquemment à parler plus tard (mais en général se lancent directement dans les deux/trois/etc langues). Au délà de la littérature, j’en avais déjà fait l’expérience avec mes frères et soeurs, donc je n’étais pas inquiète, mais quand un pédiatre dit qu’il y a un retard de développement comme ça… ça peut être grande source de stress pour de jeunes parents. Les enseignants à l’école maternelle me disaient tout simplement d’arrêter de lui parler ma langue maternelle pour accélerer l’apprentissage du français… Deséspérant.
My daughter was born in France, and I spoke my mother language (Russian) with her since she was born. We got a lot of incomprehension from child specialists/teachers, because multilingual children often start speaking later (but in general they go straight into learning two, three etc languages). Aside from the scientific literature, I’d already had experience in the matter with my siblings, so I wasn’t worried, but when a pediatrician says that there’s a developmental delay…that can be a great source of stress for young parents. The teachers at the nursery school told me flat out to stop speaking with her in my mother language, in order to quicken her learning of French…terrible.
>On a dit la même chose à une amie Mexicaine qui parle français et espagnol à sa fille. Ils ont réussi à faire paniquer la maman et lui faire imaginer qu’elle perturbait le développement de son enfant… La petite a 7 ans maintenant et parle les deux langues, et n’a aucun problème à l’école. Je suis assez choquée de voir que c’est une réaction courante des spécialistes.
They said the same thing to a Mexican friend of mine who speaks French and Spanish to her daughter. They managed to make her panic and make her think that she was disturbing the development of her children…her kid is 7 years old now and speaks the two languages, and she doesn’t have any problem at school. I’m quite shocked to see that it’s a common reaction of specialists.
Weird, I have made the opposite experience. Every German with a migration background I know was talked to in the native language of their parents, and usually when I ask them why it is so they give the answer “my parents thought I’d learn German in Kindergarten anyways”.
Especially Russian parents that came here in the 90s after the fall of the Berlin wall tend to not speak German very well in general in my experience.
Sweden encourages the opposite if anything, and when I became a parent then I was also encouraged to speak my language at home because kindergarten would teach Swedish anyway. To me that seems like the most reasonable approach, children basically get an extra language “for free”.
I think the reality is that most immigrant parents speak their native language at home and the children only start to learn German in Kindergarten/elementary school. This results in an disproportionate amount of migrant children not being able to speak good enough German (and with a heavy accent) to get into the “higher” schools and end up in the Hauptschule. Another problem is that in areas where there is a high concentration of immigrants the children tend to stick together and continue to speak their native language so that their German skills suffer even more. So the concept of starting to learn the language in Kindergarten only works when there are almost only German speaking children so the child is “forced” to speak it as well.
So it makes sense to encourage parents to teach their children the language of the country they are living in.
Maybe it is a generational thing?
I have never encountered professionals in Germany recommending that and I am not aware that have my parents or their and my peers have encountered such a recommendation. I grew up bilingual, like most people (with migration background) around me.
Immigrants growing up with German only is more something I encounter with people that were born in the 70s and older.
I am in a mixed national and language marriage, the advice we were given with our daughter was speak your native language to your children. If you cannot speak the language locally to perfect fluency any mistakes you make will be compounded into the child. It is better to speak a less common language well than a local one badly. A child will learn the local language relatively easily if immersed properly.
So in my case I speak English to my daughter and my wife Russian, she will learn Dutch at school/Kindergarten. She will be trilingual from a young age and we will be encouraging her to learn German as well since we spend a lot of time there and we both speak it to a decent level.
It’s not scientifically supported in any way and either those people were giving out outdated information out of ignorance or they were xenophobic, there’s no other way. Scientifically, it’s best to introduce languages early on and the confusion level is minimal at best and children easily overcome it. The benefits of bilingualism from early on far outweigh brief moments of confusion. In fact, in multilingual households what often happens is one parent speaks one language and the other another language. The idea is consistency, meaning that a child associates places or people with certain languages but it in no way means to not teach two languages.
Currently, the scientific consensus is that introducing more than one language as early as possible is the most beneficial and children can easily handle learning more than one language simultaneously without any problem.
I was born in France and my parents where expecting to stay their for a while at the time. My mum is Irish and my Dad is French. In the hospital after giving birth to me, my mum was talking to me in French. She just thought that since we were going to be living in France it’s probably better that we speak French. The nurse over heard her and told her to stop. She said that it’s very important that the baby hears his parents speak in their most comfortable and fluent language (my mum’s french is decent but not fluent). We ended up moving to Ireland when I was one and since then my mum speaks to me in English and my Dad speaks to me in French. Unusually tho I always speak to my Dad in English, so we have a bilingual conversation all the time. I feel very lucky to have these two languages especially since they are two of the most widely spoken on Earth. In Ireland people really don’t care what you speak at home to your kids. I would even say it is considered bad to not speak to your kids in your native language.
Teaching the languages is an advantage.
Forcing cultural ties with the parents country instead of the one you were born in is trouble.
Telling you to only speak the language of “the country” is shortsighted, racist, and in most cases illegal.