Citizenship

[pne]

I've talked it over with Stella and it looks as if the child will only be German.

It would be possible for the child to acquire British citizenship if we moved there later and lived in the UK for at least three years, though that might cause it to lose German citizenship unless it applies for a special dispensation.

Maybe it's for the best—there's no telling how much English it'll pick up, and it'll never have lived there.

Comments

bilingual children

[pne.livejournal.com]

You always speak to it in English. Wife always speaks to it in German.

That will produce full bi-lingual children. They will even have an English accent while speaking english and a German accent when speaking german.

If only it were that easy. I've considered this, too, and it seems the most obvious (and it's essentially what my parents did with us), but I see at least the following two catches:

1. I'm not sure whether I could consistently speak to my children in English. I should speak more English to Stella to help her practise, but in practice (heh), I forget, mostly because I'm used to speaking German to her and because it's a lot easier to elicit a response this way.


2. In the end, it depends on the child whether they're willing to be bilingual or not. At least, that's the conclusion I've drawn from hearing various stories. Some children respond well to an attempt to raise them bilingually, some don't.

For an example of the second point, there's the story of the child who was raised bilingually English/Klingon and started speaking Klingon but later rejected it (brief Wired article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8)).

Also, as one person who commented on this article (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001190.php) said,

It's my understanding that when you try to raise a bilingual child by having each parent use one language exclusively, there are often problems if one of the languages receives little external reinforcement and the child realises that the respective parent can understand the other language.

which are other problems I see, especially since I (as the breadwinner) will be at home a lot less than the mother who speaks the national language which the child will learn from playing with other children and at school. (Though, to be honest, English is one of the easiest languages to provide external reinforcement in since it's probably easier to procure English-language books/videos/nursery rhymes/etc. than material in other languages, simply due to the large number of English speakers.) Also, Stella doesn't speak hardly any English, so the child would have a problem if it tried to speak to her in English. (In our family, both parents spoke both languages fairly fluently, though they spoke only one language each to the children after I was three, when my mother switched from English to German with me.) But the children will still find out that I can speak German, since I'll be speaking German to Stella, so they may want to take the easy way out.

Finally, there's the example of my little sister. As I recall the story being told, she initially spoke good English, but when she got into kindergarten and found out that nobody else spoke English, she rejected it and wanted to speak only German.

My father continued to speak to her in English, but she would only respond sometimes (saying "I can't understand!" sometimes instead, and nearly always replying in German). (She does speak English now, though, though maybe not quite as well as my other sisters.)

So yes. I think that the "one parent, one language" approach may be the most conducive to raising bilingual children, but in the end, it requires the child's co-operation and is not failsafe. It did work for me, though, and as you said, I acquired a British accent when speaking English (which school later changed to an American one, but the British is resurfacing) and a German accent when speaking German, and I'm very glad of my two languages.

I'd like my children to have two languages, but I'm not sure of my discipline and their success. Maybe I'll have to try to pretend I don't speak German.