My daughter was born three months before the COVID-19 restrictions began where we live. Stuck at home with a new baby, I needed something to keep me busy, and I’m too mishap-prone for sourdough. For a linguist like me, a language-related project seemed like just the thing.
I decided to dust off my French — which I spoke quite well in high school but hadn’t used in decades — so I could speak it at home with my daughter. What parent hasn’t heard about the benefits of bilingualism for little brains?
Six years later, my project has outstripped all my expectations. We’re lucky to have bilingual schools in our neighborhood. Because my daughter hears French from her peers as well as from me, she speaks it just as fluently as the English she uses with my husband and the rest of our family.
My own ability to express myself in French grew little by little alongside hers. Today, we rarely speak English when it’s just the two of us.
Some people think I’m making a mistake
My French is far from perfect: I’m never going to get rid of my American accent, and my speech is peppered with small mistakes — like le vidéo when it should be la vidéo.
Sharing my family’s language journey online, I’ve gotten criticism that my grammatical slips could harm my daughter’s linguistic development. “If I wasn’t fluent enough to not make errors, I would not be speaking that language to my child 100% of the time,” one poster told me.
Others have raised concerns about my emotional connection with my child. “The optimal language of interaction is the caregiver’s heart language (most dominant language),” a commenter on a bilingual-parenting blog warned.
What the research shows
Since I’m a linguist by profession, I did a deep dive into the literature on bilingual development at the start of my project, and what I learned reinforced my decision to focus on French.
Many people believe that children are little sponges for language, but that’s only half true. Children automatically soak up the language they hear in the surrounding community, especially from peers. But a language children hear mostly at home needs more encouragement to take root.
And even if they don’t absorb the whole language overnight, children do have an advantage in certain aspects of language learning. My daughter doesn’t imitate my accent and my grammatical errors. Instead, she corrects them. “Le vidéo doesn’t make any sense, maman,” she once told me in French.
The shared learning experience is invaluable
I once asked my husband if he thought speaking French was damaging my emotional connection with our daughter, who is now 6 years old. He snorted. “If anything, you have the opposite problem. You two are weirdly close,” he told me.
It’s true we have a very strong bond, what the French call une relation fusionnelle. And I suspect that our shared language journey has fostered that close connection rather than harming it.
Learning French is a project my daughter and I have shared for six years. Our current dynamic is unique: I still have a larger vocabulary and can teach her new words, but she is the one teaching me when it comes to pronunciation and certain aspects of grammar.
I do sometimes worry about the years to come. Will my French be strong enough to navigate the complexities of adolescence, for example. But it reassures me to watch my daughter slip effortlessly between English with her father and French with me. If her feelings become too complex to express in French, we can always pivot to the native language we share.
This summer, our family moved to France for a one-year sabbatical, so we will be discovering a new culture in addition to our language learning. Whatever languages we use in the future, this opportunity to broaden our horizons together will always remain precious.
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