Bilingualism

[@tiwinee]

My nephew is bilingual. When he was younger, he thought for a few months that since he speaks Czech with his mother, he should speak Czech to women and Spanish to men since his dad is Spanish ^^

[@Smegma007]

Patriarchy.

[@ArturoStojanoff]

Oh wow. I know a family half Spanish and half Czech speaking too....

[@plerpplerp5599]

Magali That is cute!😁

[@AlfonsoSegundo791]

And to trans? They also have got the right to be spoken, don't they?

[@LesserMoffHootkins]

My son knew to speak Spanish to Mexicans, and English to gringos and blacks. People from from India confused him.

[@Talliwa123]

I know a child who is being raised in a trilingual household (Portugese, Spanish and French). When she was 3-4 years old she basically spoke her own gibberish which was a mix of all three and only fellow portugese-spanish-french trilinguals could figure out what she was saying . But then gradually she grew to separate all three and it was really amazing to see. Now at age 5-6 in the space of one conversation she will look at me and address me in French ( I do not speak Portugese or Spanish) and then turn to her mother whom she addresses in Portugese and then listen to her father speak to her in Spanish to which she then responds to in Portugese (because she's a rebel).

[@hydroxenon9364]

TalliwaTalks haha I am also trilingual sometimes I start talking in one language and switch over to another without realizing and everyone looks at me.

[@yusufpolat228]

First, you guys are doing a great job. Second, could I be still rude enough to ask for something else? Is it possible for you to give us the citations of the studies you mention in your videos? You can simply do it in the description part not in the videos. Even just the name(s) of the researcher(s) and the date of their study would do. Peace.

[@Reddie23]

Love your chanel! I'm a linguistics student in Barcelona so my mother tongue is Catalan. It's nice to hear about my language in a Linguistics Chanel on youtube, and also rare so... Double nice! Following your Ling Space and recommending it to my university partners!

[@PagoAoE2]

When you said that bilingual Children have an easier time learning languages later in life. I know that is so true. I have a cousin who speaks Swedish and English and he says that learning German is easy for him.

[@hydroxenon9364]

HamSandwich yea I know german English and french and learning Spanish and Swedish is easy, as a lot of vocabulary is similar

[@PackOfWolves]

I'm so glad you mentioned code mixing there later on, I was about to VEHEMENTLY DISAGREE in the comments about there being a fence between the grammars in a kid's brain hahaha It's interesting to see all this from an academic perspective, as I pretty much lived through all these things you're talking about. Like, both my parents are tri-lingual, but only spoke code-mixed Bengali-English around me (Mum used more Bengali grammar, Dad used more English). So I picked up Bengali and English fine, and code-mixed with my family all the time (but not at school!). Later I discovered that actually I only learned the "casual" grammar forms of Bengali from my parents, so if I try to interact with people below me or (especially!) above me in the social chain I have to be concentrating really hard to not mess up the verbs and forms of address*. And forget about the complex/formal vocabulary used in literature or even on the news, I can barely understand any of it! *I mean the only time my parents ever used the higher forms of address (that you'd normally use for anyone you don't have a personal connection with, like professionals, acquaintances, or old-fashioned older people) is when they were being sarcastic about the other person acting really arrogant or too self-important (we practically used royal pronouns/verbs for when the dog was being fussy about her food "madam dog does not deign to put such inferior food in her mouth, ooh la la"). And only Mum uses lower forms of address (Dad is too nice/polite), and even then only when she's ordering us to do things ("make tea" "get me the remote") or when she was doing the thing where parents try to be ~hip~ and ~connect~ with you on ~your level~ ("eyyy, wassupp, what'dja do at school?"). It was always super weird when she did that last one because it was SO OBVIOUS she /literally/ switched grammar to "fit in" when I didn't even use that grammar because obviously I only spoke English with my friends!

[@thelingspace]

PackOfWolves Yeah, code mixing is definitely important to mention! I think it's what makes people feel confused about what their kid is doing the most.Very interesting about your Bengali and English! It's definitely true that divorced from the community, it really is hard to maintain all the different cultural address stuff. Even if you're exposed to them (if only occasionally, unless your dog is very snooty?), it's hard to have deploying them just right feel natural.I'm a Japanese speaker, albeit as a second language, and I often struggle with the forms of polite address in that language. But it's nothing compared to Japanese speakers I know who grew up bilingual in North America and then went back to Japan. At least no one expects me to get it all right. It can be really hard on them; they end up being offensive without meaning to, and it's really frustrating.Thanks for the comments!

[@michelles7601]

I have a good friend that was raised bilingual, but only until she was about 9. She talked English to her dad and German to everyone else. Now she has problems with both languages. She only had classes for English as a 2nd language, which is why she barely improved age 10 and up but she also has trouble with German. In German she oftentimes uses English word structure and literally translates what she'd say in English. (Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker)

[@gratakilla]

Okay now i understand why my spanish step mother can't understand the difference between the two 'e' phonemes in catalan, I was going crazy trying to explain to her that they are totally different !

[@thelingspace]

+gratakilla Yep, it's quite challenging to hear the difference between those vowels if you don't have them. Distinguishing things that fall within the same category for you is just really hard. I hope she can work it out eventually, though!

[@thelingspace]

+Étienne Murase Yeah, that was the idea there. In spoken French, it's usually left out. Also, we thought including both parts of the construction might be confusing to the point that we wanted to make here. Thanks for the comment! ^_^

[@4c00h]

It's so much easier to express oneself in multiple languages. There are some words and phrases that just can't be replaced. O a caso SOY UN MENTIROSO??

[@MsCharSui]

You're so right there!

[@davidm.johnston8994]

The infirmation in this video is awesome as usual on this channel. But you guys should try to take longer shots so that there are fewer cuts because the edit is quite a bit jarring the way it's done now. It would flow better if done with fewer cuts I think.

[@InsertTruthHere]

4:46 For the German-English kid, did you intentionally pronounce the [pf] of pfeifen as [f]? This isn't proper if you apply an adult's standard of clear speech, however, in my experience, children never pronounce [pf] correctly until about 6 or 7 years old. Did you bear this in mind (cause that would be pretty amazingly accurate) or did you just not manage to pronounce it right?

[@thelingspace]

+InsertTruthHere Yeah, although there have been times where we have operated at that level of thinking, that wasn't one of them. It's true that you wouldn't expect young kids to nail the [pf] combo - that's a pretty hard one, and it's unusual as an onset cluster cross-linguistically. But in this case, it was me not getting it, I think. It's been a while since this one, so I'm not 100% sure, but yeah. Our director is a German speaker, so usually if she lets things go, I assume I did them okay. Maybe she was thinking in the way you did! ^_^

[@PrincessSakuno]

yea I used to mix Mandarin and Cantonese together up as a kid becos my Mum and Dad spoke one of each natively. I dont know when I knew but I knew it was appropriate to address my Mum in Mandarin and my dad in Cantonese. One grammar mistake from the dominant side would get into the other but it was easily managed when my mum pointed it out, I still remember that quite well.

[@Speedcuber6969]

this channel saves my life as I am majoring in ling

[@emroyka]

Thank you for another great video! As a multilingual new parent I can really appreciate this topic! I have a question that may be a bit of a tangent to code mixing: what about when a speaker adapts their speech (often by changing the accent, tone or rhythm) based on their interlocutor? I've been told I sometimes do this and wonder whether this habit might be passed along as well.

[@thelingspace]

emroyka Thanks for the question! There's no need to worry about your child picking up this habit. Or, rather, that they'll necessarily pick it up. They might pick it up, but as long as they have exposure to other speakers of each languages and the community, they'll work out the appropriate accents and rhythms for themselves. We can see this in how children of non-native speakers pick up languages in their community, or people with one dialect of a language living with their kids in the midst of another dialect (like, say, Americans in Edinburgh). Kids in those situations may pick up a few limited words or such from their parents, but they'll fit in far more with the speech community, because that's where the bulk of the data is coming from.So your child may pick it up a little, but we should expect them to adopt more of the speech norms of the community she's talking with. It's worth saying that people do usually adapt their speech to match the conversation and who they're talking with, though, so your child may pick up this! But she'll probably learn the patterns of the people around her, more than yours specifically. Whether that's good or bad depends on your point of view, but that's the way of it. ^_^

[@OfekAzulay]

As a native Hebrew speaker, I loved the ending :) subscribed!

[@thelingspace]

Ofek Azulay Glad you liked it! Sometimes I worry about pronunciation for those, but I think that one turned out all right. ^_^

[@enriquebarbanera]

I'm born bilingual, Italian and Spanish Edit: right now I got a good level of English. Thanks for that and music

[@pleinair6318]

Im born bilingual, My mom spoke english and my dad spoke Spanish.

[@masonmiles3770]

same

[@seher8720]

You are so lucky

[@lupinchytips]

Hello, is there a video about bilingualism for children and adults?

[@sarikaaktarorpa4181]

Anyone help me by giving the relationship between diglossia and bilingualism.

[@prettymuchheather]

This is great. Nicely done!

[@thelingspace]

prettymuchheather Thanks! Glad you liked it. ^_^

[@なつみ-c4y]

I wanted to be raised as a bilingual kid...

[@highnoon9333]

Hi Mr. Lieberman: thanks for your videos! Just wondering, where are you from? I assume the US or Canada from your accent, but which part? There are some words that you pronounce in a way I've never heard before. Thanks! Love your videos.

[@thelingspace]

Lindsay Resnick Glad you're liking the videos! So I grew up in New Jersey, but bounced around a lot between different places after that. And now I've been in Montreal for close to ten years. The result generally has been that my phonology got a bit strange, and I've ended up with an accent where Americans usually think I'm Canadian, and Canadians usually think I'm American. But I've gotten used to it. ^_^

[@AlfonsoSegundo791]

What about being stuttered in 3 lan lan lan languages?

[@EnglishHutLearning]

Well described

[@jeroencasse518]

Hey @The Ling Space I'm a native Dutch speaker, and my English is near fluency. I have been speaking English since I was little, I've studied to become an English teacher and I use English daily. My wife is Japanese, and we both live in Japan. I don't really think it will be useful for our child to learn Dutch, but I rather want it to know English (and Japanese). Is it possible to raise your child in a non-native language? Would it be better to use my native language? Or could you raise a child in 3 different languages?

[@Emile.gorgonZola]

jeroen casse You sure you're fluent in English? You made mistakes

[@kieranwalker3953]

There’s no problem using your second or even third language if you feel comfortable and have the motivation it just might be harder since it’s not as intuitive, the only reason I might advise against it is cultural, what if the kid grows up and wants to go visit the Netherlands/Belgium ? Or they might feel excluded from cousins or other family. Also with English I feel like there are so many opportunities for someone at any age to learn it (you could enroll them in an international school for example or get them after school lessons get them to watch English TV) and the same might not be true for your native Dutch. Regardless of what one you choose/chose I hope your family is doing well!

[@joshuddin897]

You shouldn't refer to your child as 'it', better to say him/ her or even them.

[@GregSanders]

So has anyone worked out a way to give babies, particularly those without truly bilingual parents, the proper opportunity to learn a new language. I'm guessing it may actually require tutoring or the like, although perhaps there's language classes you can take with a newborn in tow. It just seems like a huge opportunity, but also a difficult one to exploit if it's not a bilingual household to begin with.

[@dannywang2882]

You need to hire a full time nanny/au pair or be immersed in another country. Otherwise, it's very difficult unless the child has an innate interest in foreign languages.

[@GregSanders]

That makes sense. Although I'm not sure what level of interest necessary to keep things like being able to differentiate between certain sounds and the like.

[@thelingspace]

Greg Sanders I'll have to disagree a bit with our other commenter here. It's true that you really need to have a lot of content, which is easier if you have immersion or a caregiver. But f you can expose the baby from a pretty young age significantly, it can still work. Like, say, if you left your baby at a day care in a different language, and they heard that all day, even if that was the main source of exposure, it could be enough.The trick is asking how much exposure is enough exposure. Kids also need the right exposure - it has to be language in an environment connected to things. But it's doable! It just takes some work.That said, early child L2, while not exactly the same as simultaneous bilingualism, is still really good! They may not have all the exact same intuitions as a totally native speaker of the language, but the proficiency is such that outside of linguistics experiments, it's hard to tell. If you can get a lot of exposure within the first few years, you can still do quite well. And as they get past the baby stage, involving them in multilingual contexts gets easier.

[@buttercup_roach]

The Ling Space My boyfriend used to be able to speak Arabic simply because he went to a daycare where they spoke Arabic, so you're right! However he lost it later on due to lack of use/exposure

[@thelingspace]

Amy R Thanks for chiming in! Yeah, acquiring the language isn't the end of the challenge - you also need to keep using it, or you lose it. Still, it's better to have had it and lost it than not had it at all!

[@victorfergn]

What if you are 32 yeras old and you suck at every language you speak? :(

[@InezAllen]

I code switch quite regularly. Does code switching around babies change their language acquisition process, or does it stay pretty much the same?

[@Citrine_Skies]

Although most of my research into language learning (as I have been learning German for a long time now and have been looking into other languages) has not been specific to infants, I'm inclined to believe that an infants language acquisition process would not be negatively affected by others "code-switching" around it. If the child was learning both of the languages that you tended to combine or switch, I would assume that the child would adopt your code-switching as it's own linguistic-exercise and learn to distinguish the components native to each language. And if not, then he or she might learn to distinguish the components native to the language they "are" learning and disregard the non-native components OR maybe even develop more linguistic dexterity by being able to identify, if not understand the non-native components . Not sure if that helps any, but I think this is an absolutely fascinating topic! xD

[@PackOfWolves]

As someone whose parents really only spoke code-switched Bengali-English, I can tell you that what Gavin said is pretty much what happened with our family! I am more linguistically inclined, so I learned both languages, while my brother, who is less into languages, learned both and then quickly forgot Bengali when school started. In my experience, if the parents/caregivers speak purely one language at home, and the child goes on to learn another outside the home, they are much less likely to forget the native/home language than if the kid spoke code-switched language at home (unless they have an innate interest in languages and reading). So although the child would learn both languages faster with exposure to code-switching, they are also more likely to forget the language that is half-spoken at home only. Even if they remember both, the child is limited to the /way/ you spoke to them, and probably won't learn any complex vocabulary or less common grammar forms unless you go out of your way to teach them/immerse them in media.

[@thelingspace]

Valkiro Allen Thanks for the question! Babies really don't have any problems dealing with mixed input like this. There's a lot of research to point to this, but to start, at the base phonological level, research by Peter Jusczyk and various colleagues through the 90s shows that babies tune into the particular rhythmic patterns of their language. So babies are very good at categorizing where stress falls in a language, and pay attention to words that match the regular stress pattern of the language more.If babies are attuned to stress patterns or tone, it'll be easy to categorize what should go where. There are a lot of rules that underlie where we put stress for languages, or even if we use stress at all, and so it'll be clear what words or such should go in which box. And that's just one part of what babies can do! There's so much information to work from, and babies are so attuned to how language can work, dealing with code switching isn't going to trip them up. They should get both languages fine, as long as they get enough exposure.

[@thelingspace]

Gavin Iverson Definitely! Thanks for your response. Babies really are good at being able to pick through the noise and get at what's actually useful for the language. Research from Lila Gleitman and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania argues that kids don't really pay attention to stuff that's ambiguous for really forming lasting grammatical ideas or mental dictionary items. So if they're not sure, they'll let it go, and wait until it's clearer in the future. And they have the flexibility to recover and match the rest of the community if they need it!As you suggest, it may be that having regular enough exposure to sounds or such from the other language could be helpful. Bilingual babies definitely do have an advantage for hearing sounds beyond monolingual babies (we talk about that in the extra material back on the website for this episode), and code-switching could play a part in that. How much exposure is enough, though, is an open question, and one that linguists'll keep researching, too.

[@thelingspace]

PackOfWolves Right, the quality of the exposure really matters, too. If the only exposure you get to a language is one with a lot of code-switching, that could definitely impact the language you end up acquiring. But even that isn't enough - the kind of code switching matters, too. So switching sentence by sentence is more likely to lead to good outcomes than switching in the sentence, swapping out words or grammatical structures. But with enough input, it should still work out overall.

[@VerbaleMondo]

I speak English and learning Japanese and French!

[@evolvemartinez7860]

How many languages do you speak? Which ones?

[@thelingspace]

+Evolve Martinez I speak English natively, and Japanese at advanced / near-native; French, I'm probably intermediate; Hebrew, I was fluent in at one point, but it's very rusty now; Arabic, very basic. ^_^

[@hydroxenon9364]

The Ling Space how many would you consider yourself fluent in?

[@RyanDB]

I know that I should be liking this video for the content, but I won't lie. That like is for the reference :P

[@thelingspace]

Haha, we'll take it either way. Thanks. ^_^

[@aquarius4953]

Hum, negation come after the verb in French... Not exactly. I'm French and I can tell you that in my language the pattern for negation is ne/verb/pas or n'/verb/pas Ils n'ont pas gagné. Je ne suis pas libre. The problem is we drop the "ne" too often when we speak but that's incorrect. Anyway very interesting topic.

[@kairoslara]

Yves That's why he said "in spoken french"

[@Emile.gorgonZola]

"that's incorrect" Lol go watch the video on prescriptivistism

[@jackgale813]

i find your head movements funny, sorry for having to have notice that informative though

[@LuckyNala]

owh gosh talk about code mixing. it gets hilarious sometimes :)

[@thelingspace]

Natascha Fisher Yeah, it can definitely get quite mixed together. It's very interesting stuff. I feel like I do it a lot around people who I know can handle both the languages, and it can be for comedic effect, for sure. ^_^

[@LuckyNala]

I code mix with my daughter all the time. she's so used to it but then you see people looking at you and you're like, owh yeah that does sound quite silly. My boyfriend (from the UK) always laughs at me when I slip up, trip over my words or even accidentally speak Dutch to him. we make it work though. it's all good ;)

[@LuckyNala]

lol she does it to me too. me: S. wat eet je? (what are you eating?) daughter: ik heb niks,bye ( I haven't got anything, bye) :) here's another one. me: S. stop running, we hebben buren beneden. (stop running, we have neighbors downstairs) it just comes naturally, I don't even notice I'm doing it. :)

[@thelingspace]

Natascha Fisher Yeah, it would come naturally. These are really nice examples! Thanks for sharing. ^_^

[@davidskszp1408]

You trully love fonetics, It took me a while to figure that transcription out

[@Emile.gorgonZola]

David Skszp You're just dumb

Your French sentnce has an error. it should be: Les Browncoats *n'ont* pas gagné la bataille de la Vallée de la Sérenité. Or did you leave out _n'_ because it was *spoken* French?

[@jerrychina3853]

He stated that it was spoken French

[@beequeen9228]

👌🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

[@Smegma007]

ils n'ont pas gagné, ...

[@rrnlg2279]

Children are actually terrible at learning language compared to adults. Adults are capable of learning much faster. It just that adults don't have the free time a baby does. If an adult spends around ten hours a day practicing he or she can be fluent in less then a year. Toddlers have little else to to learn and take almost a decade.

[@MrsGreenStrauss]

A decade later, you're not a baby or a toddler anymore, but a (pre)teen and if you weren't already "fluent" in your native tongue years before, it's surprising. (Not being able to speak with your voice doesn't mean you're not "fluent", by the way.) Babies and toddlers have tons to learn, lots of physical stuff to master (not only for talking), social rules to learn, etc. Talking is also linked to a bunch physical stuff, even if you're not using sign language. Also, "fluent" is a very vague word and basically means anything you want it to mean, but even considering this you're taking it a bit far. That's not exactly... like, you're saying that the average 10-, maybe 12-years-old just became fluent in their native tongue while saying an adult can become "fluent" in a language in a year (an adult can, but so can a toddler and a teen...) (it's actually so vague you end up saying it takes a decade for children to become "fluent", which is... maybe showcasing your very low expectation of 10-years-old vocabularies or something, if I try guessing the reasoning behind it.) I think you don't actually understand what happens in babies' brain very well. They're not just sleeping there and doing nothing but listening to adults talking, but actively learning all kinds of stuff.

[@ellieross6795]

At the end of the day, it depends a lot on how much effort is put into learning the language. If an adult is fully immersed in the French language, for example, and a young child learns French for 10 minutes a day, then obviously the adult will become fluent in a quicker time than the child. However, young children absorb languages very easily - from listening, from talking, etc. There is actually a prime time to learn a language, which is in childhood, as the brain is still developing. Thus, that is why people who learn a language in their childhood will likely be able to speak with native-like fluidity, sometimes referred to as equibilingualism. Most adults who learn a second language can become very good, but is very unlikely for them to obtain native pronunciation, as their brain cannot hear the slight differences that a native speaker/someone who was raised speaking the language can.

[@Emile.gorgonZola]

All of you need to go read actual research

[@vMov]

Why just why do you move your head alot it makes me uncomfortable