Raising Multilingual Children

Last updated on September 30th, 2021 at 10:18 am

“So… are they going to be bilingual?”

Many people ask me this when they hear me talk to our twins in Spanish. Since we live in Germany they assume my husband is German, but nope, he is American, so hopefully our children will grow up speaking three languages! They are almost two years old and don’t talk much yet. Well, actually they don’t stop talking the whole day long, but nobody understands what they’re saying yet!

I read somewhere the following rule for raising kids with multiples languages: “one person, one language”. So I try to be consistent and always speak in Spanish with them, and my husband only speaks in English. They started going to daycare 6 months ago where they only speak German to them and we decided to speak English at home. We have many Spanish speaking friends and family from Spain who we see more regularly than our American friends/family, so I think there is a stronger influence from my side.

So this is the mix the poor guys have to hear. The good thing is they understand everything! It’s amazing that having only “started” with the third language (German) not too long ago they were able to communicate in no time. I think being with other kids is a huge motivation but it can also be a justification for them not to speak the language their friends don’t understand. Our plan is to go on vacation as often as possible to our home countries and have them immersed in the language to help them like it and find a reason to speak it.

We read them a book every time before going to bed (each of us in our mother tongue), and every now and then we have a guest reader (i.e. any friend that stops by for dinner) because we don’t want them to catch our accents, even though we both speak the other languages pretty well. I don’t think it’s necessary to speak your partner’s language, but I do think it’s important for the parents to at least understand what the other one is saying. And also when the grandparents are visiting! Actually the grandparents were important criteria when looking for names for the boys. We wanted first names that fit the last name, with the same spelling in all 3 languages and that all 4 grandparents would be able to pronounce… difficult task! It’s already difficult when you only have to search one name, so with twins it’s (like always) a little more challenging. For 3 days they were still called Baby 1 and Baby 2 until we decided to pick two beautiful English names. We are very happy with the decision; I can’t imagine them now with any other names.

We were all very curious about the first word they would say… it wasn’t “mommy” or “daddy”. We spent a week in Italy when they were about 18 months old and everybody was being very nice to them so of course their first word was “ciao”! They even waved their hand when saying it. Now they usually say the word they need in the easiest language, for example they say Ja (yes in German), agua (water in Spanish) and go (English, of course). We have many multilingual friends and after a while their kids learned how to distinguish what language to use with whom, so we expect the same to happen to our kids.

I’m not worried about it taking them longer to speak; I also think typically boys are a little slower in that development milestone. Besides, they will surely speak better German than me and I don’t want them to correct me! 🙂 I don’t think they will appreciate how lucky they are, learning a “foreign” language when they are so little. They won’t be able to understand how much others had to suffer… and still do.

Marta Tolosa is a native of Spain and has been living in Germany for the last 12 years, where she met her American husband and raises her twin 22-month-old boys (who have 3 nationalities!) She studied computer science and works in IT. She likes to watch romantic comedies and walk back home from the movie theater.