The Question Everyone Asks

Raising a bilingual toddler is an interesting experiment linguistically. It's unendingly fascinating to see which words will come out in which language and then try to back track and find out why. One of my daughter's first Spanish words was "agua" or water. A year later, when we go out to restaurants and the waitress asks us what we want to drink, my exuberant child still places her order in Spanish, even though she knows and can say its English equivalent. Invariably, someone will ask if she speaks both English and Spanish and which one she uses most often. Kids, in particular, are fond of this question. I always tell them that my daughter uses whichever word she finds the easiest to say. Agua requires fewer labial gymnastics than water. The same is true of caca. Puppy, on the other hand, is easier than perrito with its rolling r's.

This tendency to go for the easier word matches the findings in Berk's Chapter 9 and is consistent with her continuing muscle control and memory. Recently, however, my daughter has switched to using languages based on context. Around her dad, she speaks as much Spanish as she is able. Around me and her English-only grandparents, English is the language of choice. When it's just me, my husband, and our daughter, her language choice depends on which parent she most associates the concept with. For example, going to the park is something she does with her dad, so it's always "parque." Similarly, she accompanies me on my daily jog, so "run" is always in English, even though a lot her verbs are in Spanish rather than English because they're grammatically more important in that language than they are in English.

When my husband and I first made the decision to raise our daughter bilingually, we worried that it would delay her language development. People were always telling us horror stories about how they tried to teach their kids two languages as infants and then the children didn't speak until they were four. Beck points out that there are many factors at play which dictate when a child begins to speak, one of which is personality. Considering my little girl's rather gregarious nature, it's no surprise that she spoke early and often, no matter what language her discourse was in.