How to plan for a bilingual baby? [English edition]

Transcript

Vriend van de show worden

Note about this episode This is a 100% English-language version of Episode 9, which was already released in Dutch. More English-language episodes are in the make and will be released later in 2020 as part of our plans for a new English-language edition of Kletsheads. In the meantime, find out more about Kletsheads, including what the name means, here. And if you prefer to listen in Dutch, don’t worry, the original Dutch edition will be back later in the year, too. 

Are you or your partner pregnant, and do you speak a different language from each other? Then chances are there's not just a baby on the way, but a bilingual baby! At least that's what a lot of parents hope when they find themselves raising a child together with someone who has a different mother tongue. It’s not always clear though what exactly the best approach is in such a situation. Should you both continue to speak your own language, or are there other choices you could make that might lead to better outcomes? What do you do if you don't understand each other's languages and speak a third language amongst yourselves? What will your conversations with your future offspring look like? And if you do speak the same language as each other but this is a different language from the one spoken in the community around you -- Dutch in the case of families here in the Netherlands --  you may wonder how your child will learn that language properly. In short, then, how do you plan for a bilingual baby?

In this episode of Kletsheads we talk to Eowyn Crisfield about how you and your partner can make a plan for the languages in your family, something that’s often referred to as family language planning. We hear that it's wise to think about this early on, that it's necessary to involve all the important people in your child's life, and that this plan may change over time. Eowyn gives us her six building blocks for success so that you can be sure that there is a bright bilingual future ahead for your child. This episode is mostly intended for parents, but if you’re a speech language therapist, teacher, or other professional working with young families, there’s plenty of useful information in here for you, too. There’s also plenty in here for parents who have already started their parenting journey and who are already raising bilingual children. 

Every episode we speak to a bilingual child about what it’s like to grow up with more than one language, in our feature Kletshead of the week. This episode we have two Kletsheads of the week, two brothers from Utrecht, the Netherlands, Quinn and Aiden. As part of our feature Let's klets, we speak to a parent, teacher or speech language therapist about their experiences with bilingual children. In this episode we speak to Dessu from Ethiopia about his very multilingual family. Our conversation took place at the Kletskoppen child language festival held in Nijmegen on 29th February, 2020.

Sharon interviewing Dessu at Kletskoppen child language festival [Photo: Hans van Wetering]

Eowyn Crisfield is an expert in multilingual education and parenting. She comes from Canada, where she earned her Bachelor in Teaching English as a second language and her Master of Applied Linguistics.