Bilingual Language Development and Disorders

[@Rickybhz]

love this woman, great video... love your Spanish...

[@dzivri]

The professor on the video says we should talk to our children in ways that make us comfortable, but at the same time promotes code switching and doesn't give alternatives. Both my wife and I are English university professors in the US, but at home we speak our native language (Macedonian). Maybe it is because we are linguists that we simply cannot allow ourselves to code-switch. We find it to be an interesting phenomenon to observe, but being prescriptivists/purists we find partaking in code switching an impossible task. The problem is that we have a 3-year old and we are wondering whether we are doing the right thing speaking to him exclusively in our L1. We don't want him to fall behind, but at the same time we would be devastated if he grows up preferring English to Macedonian and if he doesn't speak Macedonian like a native speaker (without code-switching). We are certainly encouraging English from other sources (play dates, TV, part-time daycare), but this amounts to no more than 15-20% of the language with which he comes in contact. I would appreciate insight from someone who may have been faced with a similar dilemma.

[@muraroligia]

dzivri don’t worry. I moved to the US when my oldest was 1 and never heard of English before, and we only spoke our mother tongue at home too just like you as my husband and I are both Brazilians. As he grew older and went to school he mastered English and by the age of 7 had a better vocabulary and pronunciation than we did. So your son won’t stay behind in English if you live in the US and I’d suggest you keep speaking in your mother tongue to him, but in order for him to practice it, you’ll probably have to take him on vacation so he can meet family and kids that speak Macedonian, or else he’ll only answer you in English. My son’s Portuguese skills got much better after we spent an entire month with family in Brazil, but if we spend a long time not going there his Portuguese goes flat. So in short don’t worry about English, he’ll get there rather sooner and you’ll probably have to worry about his Macedonian then.

[@levanahbatlila859]

Why do you use only she and her when referring to a child?

[@levanahbatlila859]

Why do you say only she and her when talking about a child?

[@susanosky1]

So professor, how can I help my child?? And what happens when the language pathologist speaks only 1 language?