ABSTRACT
In the first five years of life the vast majority of children become proficient speakers of their first language. This is a remarkable achievement. Although each child is an individual, and will acquire language at his or her own pace, there are certain stages that all normally developing children pass through. The first of these stages is the preparatory stage. During their first
year, children learn to recognise a number of words. This might not seem much; after all, a dog can recognise a number of words too, but the young child has accomplished a great deal more during her first year. She has moved from being able to distinguish between the sounds of any of the world’s languages to being able to ignore differences between sounds that are not used in the language or languages spoken to her. She will have been training her speech organs by babbling – practising the sounds of language and different kinds of intonation patterns. She has also developed her body language and uses it together with intonation so that those around her are seldom unsure about how she feels or what she wants. Around the end of the child’s first year or the beginning of the
second year, he will have begun to produce a few words. Initially the words are produced in isolation, or together with babble. When a young child’s own language production gets going, things move fast. By the end of the second year the child will usually have begun stringing words together and be very good at making his wishes known, even without using words. You can get a long way with gesture and intonation if your listener is interested in what you want to say! From this stage on there is no stopping the child. The child’s voca-
bulary expands extremely rapidly and the grammar of the language or languages the child is learning is fleshed out as the child’s language tests the patterns he observes to see how to put words together. Linguists are still arguing about whether children growing up with two languages
initially develop one system or two – that is, if they have a single set of rules to organise the way they produce language or if they have one set for each language they use. This topic is explored in more detail in Chapter 11. Children who are born into mixed language or immigrant families
have an early language development which is in many ways different from that experienced by those born into monolingual majority language families. In the case of mixed language families, where both languages are used at home, the child’s main difficulty is caused by the relatively small amount of input in each language. Where monolingual English babies hear both parents saying the same words to them, as in ‘Here’s your teddy’, ‘Where’s teddy now?’, ‘What a nice teddy!’, children whose parents speak different languages to them will get less input in each language. If parents do not spend equal amounts of time talking to their children, which is the way things work out in most families, there will be little chance for the children to learn the words of one of the languages. The children are going to have a harder time separating the stream of sound into meaningful chunks of language than if they had only one language, because they will hear the same words being repeated less frequently. Each object having two names is a source of sorrow to some chil-
dren. Imagine the disappointment felt by the one-year-old who runs excitedly to her mother saying, ‘Sko, sko!’ with her new shoe in her hand only to be told, ‘Well, actually, mummy says shoe,’ or even worse, ‘No, it’s a shoe.’ Perhaps the best thing to say in these circumstances is ‘Yes, there’s your shoe!’ Obviously, great tact is required to help the child realise what is going on: that there are, in fact, two quite separate systems at work here. What the child says is correct, but inappropriate. These children have a lot more to learn than monolingual children. Consistency on the part of the parents is probably very helpful in the
early stages, that is, each parent using a single language when speaking directly to the child and, if possible, not changing according to who else is present. Families find many ways to accommodate their languages, and generally establish unwritten rules about who speaks which language to whom in which circumstances. There is a lot to be said for the one person-one language method, whereby each parent speaks their own language to the child come what may. Then the child can associate the words of each language with the appropriate parent. Another common solution is that the minority language is used in the home and the majority language used outside. For children under two or three it may be better for the parents to go on speaking the minority language
even outside the home, just to help them organise their languages. The most important thing is to find an arrangement that suits everybody in the family. Children usually manage to adapt to whatever system the adults decide on, and can generally cope even with inconsistency in the long run:
Usually it’s all right. I can personally switch language fine between English and Swedish. At a parent-teacher meeting I can speak to my mother in English and then to my teachers in Swedish. But it feels more awkward if my teachers speak English. It doesn’t matter which person he or she is speaking to. I don’t feel comfortable if people outside my English-speaking world speak English to me.
