By A Tart of Ice and Fire
Posted Thursday, June 16th, 2016
Posted Thursday, June 16th, 2016
It never really occurred to me during the crazy mad whirlwind of meeting my unequivocally Norwegian husband and falling head over heels in love, that one day I might find myself in the rather surreal position of bringing up my child in two languages. That I might be some day facing that unenviable task of first working out which language my toddler is speaking in before I could even begin to attempt to guess which word that unintelligible sound coming out of his mouth accompanied by the widest proud grin might be.
Mine was your very standard southern English upbringing. I had a stay at home mother who was, I discovered in my teenaged years, far more interesting and exciting than her outward descriptors might suggest. She had grown up an army child and spent the majority of the fifties in the swelteringly tropical heat of Singapore. My father was ever the refined English gent, a scientist working at England's top military research facility in the area.
Both my parents were intelligent, observant, kind and interesting people. Both of them were monolingual. And, like the majority of English children, I grew up monolingual myself. I knew a girl in school who was half Polish. She spoke two languages fluently and she was seen as something truly special, this mythical being that could comprehend another language? Holy wow!
But what a departure it's been to come from that mentality and move into this new one living here in Norway. Here it is perfectly normal to speak two languages, in fact three is the standard, with some basic proficiency in Danish and Swedish thrown in on top. If you only speak one language here you are either over 60 years old or a little bit lacking in intellect.
I was never a particularly talented linguist, at least not outside of my own language. I dutifully reluctantly studied both French and German at secondary school, excelling at neither and scraping through the requisite exams with the flippant aplomb of a girl who was fairly confident she could coast through the oral exam with answers like "es ist sehr grün" in response to the standard "describe your school uniform" drudgery. I'm fairly certain my teacher harboured unpleasant thoughts about me and to be honest, I can't blame her for it one bit.
And so here I was, some six years past the point in time where I had gleefully given up on any kind of compulsory language study, informing my shocked parents that not only had I gotten engaged to a seemingly random man that I had known for all of five minutes (five months to be precise, and in a long distance relationship for all of one month before the engagement) but I was also planning to emigrate to a non-English speaking country in the startlingly near future.
To my parents' credit they took this mostly calmly; my father was delighted about my engagement but I'm still not entirely sure that he was aware which of his many children I was, so he may well have mistaken me for one of my siblings in longer term relationships. My mum put up more of a fuss, although sadly for her she married my father after only three months (and I was at least planning on waiting for the actual wedding for 2.5 years) so I managed what every mother dreads, the old 'but you did it..' line.
Learning Norwegian was not an easy thing for such a stubbornly monolingual Englishwoman such as myself, but I was determined to not be one of those immigrants who only made friends with other English folk and refused to learn the native language. There are many of them, and they're dicks. I gave myself ten years in which to become fluent, I've been here for nine and although I wouldn't claim to be fluent (I doubt I ever will), I am comfortable and relaxed in my second language. At least I was, until I had to start deciphering my toddler's Norwenglish.
My first child is a boy and I've heard that boys are slower in general than girls when it comes to beginning to speak. I've also heard that children raised bilingually can be slower to start as well, but many people have assured me that this will only be a boon as they grow. I have it very lucky with this bilingual thing; at least my child's secondary language is English, an international language that is very easy to expose your child to in the form of song, literature and media.
There is a couple living up the hill from me who are raising their children bilingually with Norwegian and Chinese and I imagine that is far more of a challenge than I face. Still, I eagerly awaited my son's first words, and I have to admit that despite staying home with him for a full year and being a total chatterbox in that time, his first word was still a Norwegian one. Bil, to be precise, which means car and continues to be his most obvious obsession. It took me a full year to get him to say 'car' in English and he still won't do it regularly, preferring the Norwegian almost every time.
A is now almost three years old. At his second birthday he knew fifty words, give or take, 40 or so of them in Norwegian and only ten in my mother tongue. Now he is conversational and knows many more words, he's come on in amazingly speedy leaps and bounds and yet.. you guessed it, it's all mostly Norwegian and his sentences are a healthy 80% Norwegian with the odd english word placed in. Which, I'm sure you all can imagine, perturbs his Norwegian only speaking barnehage teachers to no end! There's a fairly solid reason for this and that is that he goes to daycare (or what we call barnehage) five days a week for eight hours a day where he is surrounded by Norwegian speakers. This leaves me only a couple of hours in the weekday evenings plus weekends to push his second language in an attempt to have him at an equal level of competence.
I do notice that when we spend a few weeks in the UK with my family, and then the only Norwegian he's hearing is from his dad, his English really comes to the fore. He clearly understands perfectly, and has done since before he was able to communicate verbally himself, but in these times he finally assigns an equal importance to speaking the language as well as just hearing it.
All this just leads me to question my choices and consider changing our tactics as parents. Do I indulge him too much by responding to his Norwegian because I understand it perfectly myself? Or would I be helping him better if I choose to pretend I don't understand it and force him to rephrase himself in English despite him hearing me use Norwegian with his barnehage teachers and my in laws. Would it be better if his dad spoke English at home as well, making it the only language we speak in the house?
I worry that he's going to get to ten years old and I'll find him refusing to speak English at all, which would make communication with my side of the family more than a little challenging to say the least. So, I will end this word vomit with a fervent wish that you will all cross fingers and wish me luck, and perhaps I will have an update for you in a few years time when my daughter is following her big brother down the same bilingual path.
About the Author:
British ex-pat living in the icy north with her own personal God of Thunder, two marauding cats, one marauding toddler and a baby on the way. I enjoy reading, knitting, RPG, computer games, board games, snowboarding, Aikido and ranting on the internet.
