Bilingual Siblings: Language Use in Families

PARENTS’ AND TEACHERS’ GUIDES

Series Editor: Colin Baker, Bangor University, UK

This series provides immediate advice and practical help on topics where parents and teachers frequently seek answers. Each book is written by one or more experts in a style that is highly readable, non-technical and comprehensive. No prior knowledge is assumed: a thorough understanding of a topic is promised after reading the appropriate book.

Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

PARENTS’ AND TEACHERS’ GUIDES

Series Editor: Colin Baker, Bangor University, UK

Bilingual Siblings

Language Use in Families

Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS

Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Barron-Hauwaert, Suzanne.

Bilingual Siblings: Language Use in Families/Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert.

Parents’ and Teachers’ Guides: 12

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Bilingualism in children. 2. Brothers and sisters. 3. Families—Language. I. Title.

P115.2.B368 2010

404’.2083–dc22 2010041285

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-492-8

Multilingual Matters

UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA.

Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada.

Copyright © 2011 Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Two or More Children

Siblings in Bilingual or Multilingual Families

Who this Book is for

Three Very Different Siblings

Questions on Family Language Use

1 What Do We Know about Bilingual Families?

The Lack of Sibling Sets in Academic Research

Parent Researchers and Diary Data

Linguists Researching Bilingual Families

Advice for Parents in Books for Bilingual Families

Summary

2 The Growing and Evolving Family

Balancing Majority and Minority Language Use

Adapting Family Strategies to the Growing Family

Fine-Tuning Family Language Strategies

Relocating and Rebalancing Language Use

In Comes the Majority, Out Goes the Minority

Special Situations

The First or Only Child

Summary

3 The Sibling Relationship

Our ‘Preferred’ Language

Child-to-Child Language Use

The School Language Effect

Mixed Language Use

Siblings Helping to Maintain a Minority Language

Summary

4 Age Difference, Family Size and Language Orders

Close-in-Age Siblings

Wider Age Gap between Siblings

Siblings as Teachers

Families with Three or More Children

Siblings with Different Language Orders

Summary

5 Gender and Language

The Gender Divide

Girls, Boys and Language

Early-Speaking Bilingual Girls

Foreign Languages and Gender

The Girl Myth

Summary

6 Birth Order: A Child’s Position in the Family

First-Born, Middle-Born or Last-Born Children

The Birth Order Debate

Birth Order and Language Use within the Bilingual Family

Vocabulary and Language Use Linked to Birth Order

Does Birth Order Make a Difference?

Summary

7 Individual Differences: Same Languages, Different Language Histories

The Nature or Nurture Debate

Language Acquisition

Different Language Histories

Language-Gifted Children

The Extrovert Myth

Language Friction

Summary

8 Bilingualism and Twins, Adoption, Single Parents and Step-Families

Twins and Language Use

Bilingual Twins

Adoption and Bilingualism

International Adoptions

Single Parents

Siblings with Half-Sisters and Brothers

Summary

9 Five Themes on Family Language Patterns

Our ‘Preferred’ Language

Home to School Transition

A Strategy to Suit the Children

Same Languages, Different Children

Inter-Sibling Language Use

Conclusion

Family Profiles

Appendix 1 Summary of Strategies

One-Parent–One-Language (OPOL)

Mixed Language Use: Bilingual and Multilingual

Minority-Language-at-Home (ML@H)

Lingua Franca

Non-Native

Time & Place

Appendix 2 The Online Survey

Location and Nationality of the Families

The Parents and their Language Skills

The Sibling Sets

Parent’s Opinions

Glossary

Websites and Chat Forums

Recommended Books for Bilingual Families

References

Index

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank the Multilingual Matters team. I was fortunate to have Colin Baker as my editor and I am grateful for his insights and clarity. The Grover family has played an important role too. Tommi Grover guided the book through to production and Marjukka Grover gave useful feedback on the first draft. For over six years Sami Grover, editor of The Bilingual Family Newsletter has commissioned my quarterly column ‘Notes from the OPOL Family’ where I write about my children and family life in two languages.

I am very grateful to all the multilingual families who replied so promptly to my call for data through The Bilingual Family Newsletter and websites around the world. Thanks to the 25 families who took the extra time to give me more information for a case study and reply to all my emails and questions. Their replies and comments formed the basis of the book. Thanks to Sami Grover and Corey Heller from Multilingual Living magazine (www.multilingualliving.com) who helped me reach a wide range of international families for the online survey via their readers.

Thanks to all the parents and teachers who have attended my talks on Family Bilingualism or have joined the Bilingual Support Groups I ran in Kuala Lumpur and France over the last seven years. Your stories and experiences were important and have percolated through into this book. Thanks to all my wonderful friends around the world; Kuala Lumpur’s multilingual cooking group, French mamans in Chicago and my English friends here in France. Your chats over coffee inspired me and I hope some of my advice helped your families. Thanks to Sharon and June for their proofreading of the first draft.

Closer to home I would like to say merci to Jacques, my French husband, for his critical support and computer help. Last, but not least, my three amazing children, Marc, 13, Nina, 11 and Gabriel, 7, who have provided me with working models of various stages of bilingualism over time. I would like to say thank you to all their hard-working teachers and assistants over the last 10 years, who have dealt with various stages of language refusal, mixed language and speech problems.

As this book goes to print we are living in rural France and our three children are all attending French schools here. My children continue to surprise me with their ability to use two languages on a daily basis and feel at home in many cultures. It is with great pride that I see them making friends in both languages, maintaining links with their grandparents and cousins in two languages and feeling at home in two very different countries. Bravo!

http://opol-family.blogspot.com

Introduction

This book is all about bilingual and multilingual families; the parents, their children and their choice of languages. The languages a child hears and speaks can be passed on by a parent, or linked to a place or a country. The emergence of two or more languages is a wonderful thing to witness in a child’s world and the languages can be mixed together or used in separate situations or locations. As children grow up bilingually, parents can observe how their children fluidly switch from language to language to communicate with both sides of the family or within the community where they live. How do parents prepare for the arrival of a child in a bilingual family or community? Academic studies and books for parents are available to support parents and to guide them through the child’s first words and dual language use. However, studies rarely go beyond the first child starting school and often by this time a second or third child has joined the family the parents have usually established the way they communicate with their children, and a clear family language pattern exists. How do siblings fit into this family language pattern? Do all the siblings follow the same language model or do they adapt language use to suit their own needs? Will one or more child refuse to speak one language? Will two children living in the same home, with the same parents and language input, grow up with identical or have different ways of communicating linguistically? Sibling language use remains a mystery.

We know very little about the dynamics of bilingual children’s speech and how they communicate away from the influence of parents. In this book you will see how within a bilingual or multilingual family the siblings generally all speak the same languages, but not always. One child might prefer to use more or less of the mother’s or father’s language. One or more children might be more comfortable speaking the language of the school, or the community where they live. A bilingual family’s biggest challenge is to provide enough exposure to each language, to ensure each child not only hears both languages but has a chance to speak and practice too. This book explains how siblings communicate in two or more languages, within the bilingual and multilingual family setting.

TWO OR MORE CHILDREN

Siblings are the brothers and sisters in a family. It is estimated that 80% of children in the United States or Europe have a sibling. Around 10% of families have five or more children and about 1% of all births are twins. According to a study released in 2006, the average American family has 2.1 children. In 2008, statistics showed that European women have an average of 1.5 children, with a birth rate that has been falling for 30 years (except in France and Spain). In general terms, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, the Baltic States and China have declining birth rates of less than two children per family. Growing populations of families with three children are found in North and South Africa, along with some southeastern states in America. Central Africa and some parts of South-East Asia have rapidly growing birth rates. Some brothers and sisters have similar personalities and features, while others may be very different physically or in character. They may have the same parents, or they may be part of a family which encompasses half-brothers or sisters or step-siblings from widowed or divorced parents. There are also families who have adopted or fostered children.

To investigate how children interact with each other we have to look at the work of child psychologists. This field of research closely observes children’s behavior and their developing relationships with the people around them. Over the last century, psychologists have investigated the influence of working parents, stay-at-home mothers, absent fathers, child-minders and early schooling, often with contradictory findings. Their results and conclusions can be passed on to parents via doctors and health workers, often in the form of advice or parenting guides or through parenting magazines or television programs. Recommendations to parents such as being strict and disciplined, or allowing the child to choose when they sleep or what they eat can have serious ramifications on sensitive young children. Recent research into children has focused on the genetic makeup of a child and how genes might affect the personality of the child, for example, whether a child is ‘programmed’ to be active or passive. There are also developmental psychologists who look at the effect of the environment, such as the child’s home, school or their parent’s education and background. The debate over how the mix of a child’s inherited character traits, environmental influences and family makeup forms a child’s character, is ongoing. One thing that the psychologists do agree on is that parenting is a gamble, and what works well with one child may not suit another.

In general, siblings are rather under-researched, compared to the vast amount of work done on the mother–child relationship and the effect of the peer group on children. Interestingly, some children spend more time with their siblings than with their parents, and a sibling can play the role of surrogate parent, teacher, playmate or friend. However, a sibling usually has less dominance than a parent because he or she is closer to the other children in terms of behavior. Siblings can be close and care deeply about each other, but there can be intense rivalry, competition and jealousy over people, property or rights, which creates tension at home. Nevertheless, we must remember that siblings are in a ‘non-voluntary’ relationship, and usually have no choice about their parent’s decision to have other children. Siblings are unable to escape each other at home, and may be obliged to share a room, toys or space. To get the best out of the forced sibling relationship, children must learn how to live and learn together. Psychologists agree that older siblings typically play the role of a teacher and are a strong role model for a younger sibling. The younger siblings often take the role of pupil and look for help or assistance (with games, writing or reading) from older family members. A younger sibling likes to imitate and interact with their older brother or sister, but can be overly dependent on their brother or sister, to the exclusion of other children. Siblings can form a very strong emotional attachment with their baby brother or sister, and protect them from danger or harm. Children learn, through their siblings, how to negotiate and resolve problems and to see things from another person’s perspective. However, they often turn out with very different characters and personalities. Long-term studies completed by researchers working closely with families conclude that even siblings living together and sharing the same experiences can turn out as different as two children raised in two different environments.

Articles cited

USA birth statistics:

On WWW at http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/briefs.html. Accessed 10.3.10.

On WWW at www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-19-fertility_N.htm.

‘Fertility rate in USA on upswing’ by Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg. Accessed 10.3.10.

European birth statistics:

On WWW at http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=MEMO/05/96&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en Accessed 25.4.08.

‘Europe’s changing population structure and its impact on relations between the generations’ (2005).

World family birth statistics:

On WWW at http://www.pregnantpause.org/numbers/fertility.htm Accessed 10.3.10.

‘Fertility Rates (Children per Family) World Statistics’ (2001).

SIBLINGS IN BILINGUAL OR MULTILINGUAL FAMILIES

What is a bilingual or multilingual family? It is a family where two or more languages are used regularly. Within the bilingual family there are many different variations – two parents with different languages, a family living in a second-language country, a parent using a second language with their children or a family living in a community or a country which has two languages. When a second child joins a bilingual family, parents are delighted to watch the now fluently bilingual first child teach the new baby words or songs that they learnt just a few years ago. In many families the second or subsequent children become as linguistically competent as their big brothers and sisters and benefit greatly from the child-friendly conversation and role-modeling the sibling gives. But what happens if the second child does not turn out to be as fluent in both languages as the first one? What happens when one child refuses to speak one language, while the other one speaks it fluently? What if one has a perfect accent while the other sounds like a tourist in his own country? How do we react when we see one child mixing the languages and the other keeping the languages separate? These are questions asked by parents around the world.

Take the five following real-life examples.

Lise is the fourth child of French-English parents who lived in England. In England in the 1970s, the French mother wanted to fit in with her new country and life, and felt uncomfortable speaking French in public. In private, the French mother chatted to her first-born child and passed on her love of French nursery rhymes. But by the time Lise arrived, the house was full of English-speaking siblings, local friends visiting to play and a mother who spoke mostly English at home too. Lise understands French but does not speak it and now regrets never getting the same input her older sisters and brothers had. Now a mother of four children herself, Lise is hoping they will have the chance to speak more French than she did, and they regularly go to France on holiday or to visit French family.

Corinne is a bilingual French mother married to a Scotsman. Their first son, Brice, went to a local school in Scotland. Although she had always spoken to him in French, Corinne found that eight-year-old Brice would not speak French, although he understood it. When the family moved to Malaysia in 2003, they chose an English-language school for Brice and decided to put their four-year-old daughter, Chloe, in a French-language preschool. Corinne wanted at least one of her children to speak French. Chloe loved the French school and made several French friends, while still maintaining her English through friends from the condo where she lived. However, after two years of juggling two very different schools, Corinne decided to transfer Chloe to the British primary school. Meanwhile, Brice had become more positive toward French. When the family bought a house near their family in France for summer holidays, Brice found a reason to practice his emerging French. Now both children have made friends in the village and chat together in French.

Mazdida is a Malaysian married to a Frenchman with three children, Adam, Pierre and Camilla. Mazdida spoke in the local Bahasa Malaya dialect of Malaysia; her husband spoke French, while English was the main language of communication between the couple. The first son, Adam, flourished, and after English preschool was transferred to a French primary school where he did very well. When they put their second son, Pierre, in the French school three years later it was a different story. Pierre refused to speak French to the French-speaking class teacher. At a parent-teacher meeting, the father wondered why his son could not understand French at school. When the teacher asked them how much French Pierre spoke at home, the parents realized that they had all started speaking English at home, without noticing. With time alone speaking just French with his Papa, and a month long trip to France, Pierre improved. Pierre is now able to participate in classes normally.

Elisabeth is a French national living in New York with three children, Thomas, Heloise and Theodore. Her French husband loves America and wants the kids to grow up bilingual. When they arrived in New York in 2004, four-year-old Thomas had already established his French and quickly picked up English in the local kindergarten. However, his two-year-old sister, Heloise, refused to talk at all and blocked out both languages. When Heloise began to talk it was in English, the language of the crèche where she spent most days, although she understood French. The father spoke mostly English with the children too, proud that he was bringing up his children bilingually. In 2006 Thomas started attending a bilingual French/English primary school and the linguistic balance changed at home, as Thomas brought French homework and French-speaking friends to play. Heloise now felt comfortable trying out some French words with her brother. For the first time, the siblings spoke French together at home.

Raul, an American lawyer in Chicago, of Mexican descent, is proud of his family heritage. Like many Mexican-American families, he notes that the use of Spanish is decreasing, to the shame of his family. Chicago has a high Mexican origin population, yet 96% of Chicanos living there prefer to speak English. Raul says that his older brother only learnt Spanish curse words, while he learnt just enough to pass at school, and his younger brother did not learn Spanish at all. Even though their mother pushed them to watch bilingual news stations, the three teenage boys were not motivated to actually speak Spanish and read or write in the language. Now, as an adult, he is making an effort to learn his grandparent’s language and is taking courses and looking for ways to practice Spanish in the community.

The siblings in Lise, Corinne, Mazdida, Elisabeth and Raul’s families show the different experiences and reactions can have to their linguistic heritage. Each child arrives in a family with established language patterns and expectations. Over time, the parents evolve and adapt their original language choices to fit in with changing circumstances. How do we reconcile our evolving parenting with establishing bilingualism in the family? Do our family strategies change as the family grows? Do we stop being strict with language use and accept grammatical errors that we never let the first one make? How does the language of the older child affect the younger one? Does the older sibling take the role of parent-teacher for one or more languages? Will an older sibling make fun of a younger child’s mistakes? As the children grow up they make linguistic decisions for themselves that leave the parents feeling powerless and unable to intervene or choose the language the siblings choose to speak in. These issues will be considered throughout the book.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

The book is aimed primarily at parents with two or more children living in a bilingual environment. Parents may already be bringing up their children bilingually, or wondering how they can help improve, encourage or maintain bilingual language use in their home. The book is also useful for people working directly with bilingual and multilingual children; teachers, classroom assistants, counselors and speech therapists. This book brings together the experiences of over a hundred real bilingual families taken from an online internet survey, detailed case studies from around the globe and current research on multilingualism. From informal website discussion groups to organized seminars and workshops, parents wonder how they can facilitate the best language environment within their particular family. The majority of the important academic research on bilingualism over the last century was carried on first-borns or only children. Although this research is still valid we need to include families with two, three or more children. We also need to consider parents who may or may not be living together, step-parents and step-siblings, and the important people in the child’s world, the teachers, daycare workers, tutors, nannies and babysitters. All of these people might affect the child’s decision to use or refuse to use a language.

As an independent researcher, I focus on the bilingual family as a whole. As a parent of three children, I regularly hear bilingual and multilingual concerns, and the uncertainty of parenting in two languages. Parents can be geographically divided from whole branches of their families and lack people to talk to in their first language. Others can struggle to keep their children academically on track in one language while supporting another language at home or through the community. Some parents are communicating with their children in their second language. There are parents who wonder why their second or third child uses their languages in a different way and what they can do to help all their children become bilingual. The influence of siblings on each other has hardly been studied at all and it is time to hear about the language development of all children and the sibling dynamics that are created within the family.

The groundwork for our knowledge on how bilingual children develop has been done over the last hundred years, by respected academic linguists such as Werner Leopold, Jules Ronjat, George Saunders, Alvino Fantini, Traute Taeschner and Stephen Caldas. The majority of these researchers studied their own children at home, giving a detailed description of home life with two languages. There are also important studies carried out by independent researchers, comparing children or looking for wider trends within bilingual families. In Chapter 1, you can read more about their case studies, and how they have helped us understand more about how bilingualism works within the family. Throughout the book I will refer to the academic studies and how they link to family bilingualism.

The book begins with a selection of questions on siblings and multilingualism. Chapter 1 is all about what we know about bilingual families, with a brief review of important and relevant academic studies and books on bilingual parenting. Chapter 2 looks at the growing family and the strategies they can employ to suit their language needs. In Chapters 3 through 7, we discuss factors which may have an influence on siblings and their consequent language use: sibling relationships, age gaps, family size, gender, birth order and individual personality differences. These six factors are linked to bilingualism and language use, with examples from case studies and families who participated in a survey. Chapter 8 discusses families with specific issues, such as twins, step-children or adopted siblings. Chapter 9 has an overview of the main five themes.

THREE VERY DIFFERENT SIBLINGS

My children are the inspiration for my research into bilingualism and multilingualism. I am English and my husband, Jacques, is French. Together we generally speak English. As a teacher of English as a Second Language before starting a family, I knew how children could progress from beginners to fluent speakers in a short time. I was sure that for our children bilingualism would be a given certainty. I had many questions about bilingualism, which led to a Masters course in Education, and a dissertation on trilingual families two years later. In 2001, I began to research language strategies, based on my personal experiences and those of families around the world following one parent-one language (OPOL) or other family strategies. The result was the book Language Strategies for Bilingual Families – The One Parent One Language Approach (2004). My research showed that bringing up children bilingually is like any aspect of parenting, and there is no guarantee a child will become bilingual even with the best of intentions and materials.

Our first son was born in 1997. We had begun like many families with a clear decision to follow the OPOL strategy, which was frequently recommended in parenting books. Consequently, I only spoke English to Marc and Jacques spoke French. However, I found OPOL did not always fit our needs, especially when we were with friends or family who found it strange that we only spoke one language to our child. At two years and