#majority language

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Q&A: How to start speaking your native language after years of using the majority language with your child?

  Question

Hello

I’m very glad to find this website. I have three years old daughter. Our language is Urdu but we start communicating with our daughter in English. In start it was okay but now we are feeling difficulty to explain things to her in English as she is growing and asking background of things. In broad perspective it’s difficult to explain.

I start talking in Urdu now because I was…

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Q&A: How to maintain a five-year-old’s English when the majority language changes to French?

  Question

Hi there,

My daughter Ophelia is five years old. She was born in the French Caribbean, I am English, and her father is French. She attended a French nursery until last year and could speak French very well (for a 4-year-old!). She has always spoken English with me, since I do not speak French. 

Unfortunately, we were affected by the devastating hurricanes last year and myself and my…

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Q&A: How strict should OPOL-parents be with their languages when speaking to a small child?

Question

Good day,

Thank you for the good advice on multilingual parenting.

I am Dutch and married to a Jordanian (Arabic-speaking). We talk English amongst each other but try to stick with our mother tongues (Dutch and Arabic) when talking to our 15-month-old son. He is very talkative and has quite a vocabulary already. We used to live in Jordan but recently moved to the Netherlands. Most of…

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Q&A: “Will my grandson ever learn English, or will he have a strong accent?”

  Question

Hello

My English son married a Mexican girl and their son was born in the US where they still live. My daughter-in-law speaks English but with a very heavy accent and she has found this to be a great disadvantage life and work wise, as where they live there is overt discrimination against Mexicans.

May daughter-in-law speaks only Spanish to my 4-year-old grandson and translates the…

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Q&A: How to maintain a family language once a bilingual child gets immersed in the majority language?

  Question

Hello

We are a family who lives in Catalonia, Spain, we speak to our 2-year-old son in French because before he was even born we already spoke in French since we met up in Switzerland, even though any of us is French, we feel totally confident with it.

My worries are that my son will attend a Catalan school which means that even though at the moment he says more words in French than…

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Parents of bilingual children – what if one of you feels left out?

“What if I don’t understand what my child is saying?” is one of the bigger concerns a parent of a budding bilingual child can have. It can be a worry especially for parents in families who follow the one parent, one language (OPOL) strategy.

Parents who do not understand the other parent’s language can have a real fear of being left out of family conversations and not being able to fully follow…

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7 ways to motivate your child to speak the minority language

Motivation is the key to any language learning, never more so than for a bilingual child keeping up with the minority language.

1 – Habit

If you consistently stick to speaking the minority language with your children, they are less likely to want to switch to the majority language with you, even when it becomes the main language of their day spent at nursery or school.

2 – Need Nothing is as…

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