Raising multilingual child

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språker
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Re: Raising multilingual child

Postby språker » Tue Dec 21, 2021 3:49 pm

Leurre wrote:I've met 'zero native speakers' before--people who somehow sound off / foreign / like a child in every single language they speak-- and it is not pretty.


I wonder under which circumstances one risk such a thing to happen? I did a quick google on zero native speaker but didn't find so much. If parents speak to the child in their native languages, it should get bilingual, given enough exposure?

Suppose it might happen if the parents speak with the child in a language they are not native in themselves, but only if this is not the common language spoken in the neighbourhood? E.g. parents speak English with the kid, but the society speaks another language.

I had got the impression that kids learn more language, and quicker, from their peers when they start to socialise in the society, than from their parents, and would pickup the language of the surroundings to fluency---i.e. becoming native speakers. But maybe it does not bootstrap correctly in all cases?
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Herodotean
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Re: Raising multilingual child

Postby Herodotean » Tue Dec 21, 2021 4:13 pm

språker wrote:I wonder under which circumstances one risk such a thing to happen? I did a quick google on zero native speaker but didn't find so much. If parents speak to the child in their native languages, it should get bilingual, given enough exposure?

"No native language" gets better results.
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Le Baron
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Re: Raising multilingual child

Postby Le Baron » Tue Dec 21, 2021 4:55 pm

I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that most of the time the only language you develop best in a multilingual environment - if no deliberate effort for multilingualism is made - is the one in your wider social surroundings. I know this for my own case because it happened to me and although other people have contradictory experiences, you see this all over the place. Chinese kids who have to be sent to Chinese lessons because they only speak English...and some never really master Chinese. My grandparents spoke German (and Yiddish between themselves) and even though I spent a lot of time there I didn't learn functional German from them.
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