I overheard a conversation at a children’s birthday party yesterday, which popped back up into my head in the middle of the night and kept me awake:
A mother who is very conscious and intentional about raising her children bilingual explained that due to all the different dialects in Spanish, she is teaching her kids a „generic“ (my wording) Spanish, so her little ones won’t have difficulties communicating with other children, whose parents are from different Spanish speaking countries. She gave the example of the word „kite“, which varies greatly but has one word known to everyone (obviously, I am not a Spanish speaker, otherwise I would give concrete examples).
I have been thinking about this, and I decided that I disagree with this approach and actually have not used it semi-consciously with my children. I believe it might take away from the kids’ agency to negotiate language. With my own two children, I was very surprised how aware they were from a very early age that they are bilingual, and which language is which. Since they first initiated this topic, we have been having meta-language conversations ever since, including, how amazing it is to speak two languages from the beginning, to have two first languages. But that might be a topic for another post.
Deprive might be too strong of a word, but I believe by diluting your own dialect, your authentic mother tongue, when speaking to your children, you might be depriving them of a slice of culture. Maybe even of the chance to become culturally aware through language at a very early age. They might miss a chance to take agency over their language negotiation.
This is hard to do. Because once your children reach a certain age, they want you to explain the world to them. Literally! So often, you have to simplify highly complex concepts, and being a language learner myself, and dealing with many second language learners, it is often hard to differentiate between, simplifying a concept or simplifying the language. But overall I have learned, if you reduce the (linguistic) input, you reduce the learning.
My children will never speak the German, I speak for numerous reasons. For example, they did not grow up in East Germany, the few Germans they talk to frequently are not from the same town or region, not even from the same Bundesland (wiki). Additionally, they have access – under my supervision – to a vast input through German media.
But most beautiful of all, my two children are also creating their very own German. They are fortunate to tap into two fountains to water their growing garden. For instance, German does not have the verb „to pretend“ in the sense of „pretend play“. So my children use the English verb but conjugate it in German. The same goes for „to reach“. At the beginning I tried to correct them, giving them a half-sentence to replace one word. But at one point, I also was tired of it, and am now using their words myself. Will Germans who are not fluent in English understand what they are talking about when they use those words? Probably not. But my children at 5 and 6 years old, already tell me that they don’t know a certain word in German (which by itself is amazing to me), but can still express themselves using the German they do know. So, I think they will also be able to master the situation of not being quite understood, should this ever flow their way.
How great would it be to have a group of grade school children compare their Spanish words for kite, and start wondering why those words are so different, and what else might be different and beautiful?