Speaking Portuglish: How the Bilingugal thing works for us (Guest Post from Loving Earth Mama)

Welcome to the first edition of  The Blogger on Blogger Post Swap. On the last Wednesday of each month, I will be featuring a post from a fellow blogger that I love and admire and who I have developed a genuine connection with. In turn, that blogger will feature a post written by yours truly on her site. We will suggest a topic for the other blogger and them give her free reign to write from the heart.

This month I am so proud and honored to be exchanging posts with Loving Earth Mama. If you have not yet found her, you simply must go give her blog a thorough read. This is one beautiful mind. Loving Earth Mama is as deep as the abyss. She is raw, she is genuine, and she has some really powerful words. I love this mama and am so thrilled to introduce you to her. So enjoy her post and be sure to check out my post over at her blog. I’m tackling the issue of intellectualizing childhood. I have more questions than answers but I make one thing clear…I am deeply saddened by the loss of childhood. And you should be too.

"Veado"! that is the word. It has been on the tip of my tongue for weeks. I knew it was rattling in there somewhere. It means 'deer' and I just couldn't think of it for all this time until it came to me in a flash, this morning. That is one of the challenges of a mom teaching her rusty 'minority' language to her kid in an English speaking country, where she knows nobody else who speaks her other language, Portuguese. It pushes me to remember all this vocabulary that was, essentially, lying dormant somewhere in my brain - and now, the necessity of sharing it, is re-awakening not just a language but the wisps of a culture and an upbringing which was feeling so far from me... this is a healing and home-coming, of sorts.

This all started because, when my baby girl was six months old, I decided I would switch her 'mother tongue' from English to Portuguese. I am lucky to have that choice, I know. For the first six months I spoke to her in English. Honestly, I spent much of that time worrying about the bilingual thing - what if I do it wrong? The cautionary tale in my head was one bilingual (Portuguese/English) kid I knew when I was growing up who, unlike me, had learned both languages at once and was now, uh, kind of slow. I don't mean she was stupid. It was just that when she was trying to think of a response it seemed to take ages, like she was struggling to wade through all that jumbled up vocab in there. So, I did some research. Normally I dive into research. I always say I read my way into uncomfortable situations, that is how I cushion my landing. This time, actually, I mostly skimmed some stuff on the web and very quickly came across studies that showed babies can absorb and learn up to seven distinct languages - especially if a 'one person, one language' rule is observed or other clear boundaries are kept between languages so they can really sort out where one ends and the other starts. That this causes no known side-effects and has in fact been shown to have beneficial outcomes on other cognitive areas was a balm to mother's worried heart.


This might all seem obvious to many of you. After all, the consensus, at the moment, is that more languages is better. Many of my mono-lingual friends are even a tad jealous of how easily I can impart a second (and potentially third language) to my kid - without need of hiring a foreign nanny or pay out for expensive bilingual schools. I get that. People want their kids to have an edge so it might seem weird that I even questioned it... and yet for me the upsetting tale of my friend (lets call her) Rosie rung in my ears. I didn't want my kid to end up confused or slow. But don't get me wrong. I always knew I would teach her Portuguese, too - that is part of my legacy to her. I just wasn't sure whether I should let her learn one language fluently before I started exposing her to another. That thinking comes, I imagine, from the fact that that is how I became bilingual. I was born in the US and my British mom and my Portuguese dad both spoke to me in English until I was nearly six. At six we moved to Portugal and I went to a Portuguese state school... where I quickly learned a new language and integrated with my peers, seamlessly. In fact, as if often the case with bilingual kids, I did rather well in school despite the fact that the language was new to me. I was always at or near the top of my class. But the point is I learned one language first and then the other. They didn't get all scrambled up in there. And as I looked around at my mostly bilingual friends (it is amazing how when you travel a lot your friends tend not to be from here or there but somehow from 'everywhere' - citizens of the world) I realised most of them had learned like me, too - first one language (say Bengali) and then a second when they moved to their new country (say England). So I had lots of personal experience and role models that reinforced that bi- even tri- and up to penta-lingualism worked just fine but all the examples in my life were of idioms learned consecutively rather than concurrently. So, the researched helped. It helped me feel reassured that kids can totally handle learning multiple languages all at once, as is routinely the case in countries like Singapore, Switzerland or Canada, where it is just normal and parents even mix up all their languages, often, and kids still come out alright!

Still, a little part of me worried "but what about Rosie and other kids like that who seem to become 'slow' language processors? How do I avoid my kid being one of them?!"... Then a wise friend of mine said, "well, even if language confusion were to occur it wouldn't happen overnight. You watch your child and if they show any signs of struggling or of being confused you can always roll back and go back to speaking only English both at home and out and she'll quickly normalise". Ahh -an escape route... I love me an 'out'. And so I felt I could breathe again and at least try it out.

So at six months I started talking to my daughter exclusively in Portuguese. Whenever I speak directly to her I speak in Portuguese. She hears English when she is out - including from me talking to my American friends. Her dad mostly speaks English to her, too (even though he also speaks Cantonese, having grown up in England, English comes more naturally to him, too). Cantonese might come later and in the meanwhile he does read Chinese books to her and she hears Cantonese from her nana.

She is now two. Her language comprehension blows my mind. Her language production is coming along just fine, too. She speaks in six and seven word sentences often (not always) with correct grammar - in both languages. She has many four and five syllable words like the ever-so-useful 'dodecahedron' but lots of actual everyday Portuguese words, too (words are longer in Portuguese, it seems). And she is learning verb tenses: Today I said 'mama is coughing' she answered 'mama coughed' - in Portuguese. Pronouns are falling into place, too, she'll say "I'm throwing my ball", or what have you. I attribute much of this apparent ease with language to the fact that she we did sign language with her when she was little (which I have blogged about before here) which I think really gives kids an early understanding of the purpose, shape and uses of language. I also think sign language is a great tool for bilingual households because, in my view, rather than adding to the confusion, it creates a shared platform so that the kid, from very early on, sees the same sign (say 'strawberry') for the two words: 'morango' in Portuguese, 'strawberry' in English and that really helps them get that it is the same word and that mommy and daddy are only saying it differently.

Now, it is very cool to watch her switch between languages (the experts call it 'code-switching'). She will run into a room screaming something excitedly in Portuguese, look up, see it is her daddy standing there and, mid-sentence, switch into English. When we are out, too, she shows remarkable social-dexterity in moving between languages and knowing who understands what. It doesn't always work. I say that her true language is Portuglish, so the easiest people for her to talk to are me, her dad, my parents and people who understand both of these languages, because then she can chose from her FULL vocab in both languages and call upon anything she knows in either language to express herself. I mean, sometimes she only has a word in one language or the other and then she is stuck if she encounters somebody who only speaks one of them. I think she gets it, though. She sure seems to... I think she really understands who to speak to in what language but sometimes she'll still try a Portuguese word on someone if she just doesn't know how to say it English. Can't blame her, really.

She also regularly translates. If I say something in Portuguese, she is very likely to say it back to me in English. Likewise she will repeat some important information (like 'I did the puzzle by myself!!!') in both Portuguese for me and English for her dad - how thoughtful of her - LOL. Plus, when she is in free-play, kind of talking to herself, she will often be heard saying things like 'window means janela' proudly showing off she knows words in both languages. And, because I have been very explicit with her about when I am speaking what, she also correctly labels each language. I mean, you can ask her to say something in English and then in Portuguese and she'll tell you how to say it in each language. She has a clear concept of the two languages and knows what they are called, is what I am trying to say - this at age two. It is amazing what the human brain can do, especially at this age.

A lot of the bilingual kids I come across here in the Bay Area, were more rooted in one language before they switched to their second one. For example, a couple of friends of mine have kids who spoke only Chinese until they were two when suddenly socialisation spurred on a real explosion of their second language - English. But in both these cases, they had several people with whom they spoke only Chinese - typically their mother plus a baby-sitter and often a grandma and another relative, too. They understood both languages from very young but their output was all in Chinese for the longest time.

Not so with my little one. It has been Portuglish from day one, really. Then again that is the input she gets. She ONLY gets Portuguese from me, really. My parents and all my Portuguese speaking friends live an ocean away - in Portugal. So here, she only hears it from me. Then again, I am a stay-at-home (go-out-a-lot) mom so I can whisper Portuguese in her ear all day long, really. Her bedtime stories, as we snuggle down at night, are all in Portuguese. I joke that it is our 'private language' (even if it is the fifth most spoken language in the world). We have made it work, even with only one Portuguese speaking person in her life. And it works because it is me, her primary carer who is carrying this. It works in many different ways in other families in other ways, too, I know [and I'd love to hear your experiences] but this is how it works for us.

Still this model of ours brings challenges, too, like the fact that - though I said above that her pronouns are coming in strong (which they are) they came in English first and are only slowly trickling in to Portuguese, now. I expected this. I mean, for her, in her world, 'I' and 'mine' as she hears them are practically synonymous with 'mommy' and 'mommy's' - that is the only person from whom she ever hears them. Likewise she has practically only ever heard the word 'you' applied to her. So, I make up little games where I am speaking to her dollies and they speak back to me, so she can 'hear' them say the words 'I' and 'me', 'you' and 'yours', etc. Again, I think she gets it, but it is a little bit slower in Portuguese than English where she hears demonstrated the reciprocity of these words, all the time.

Overall though, as I am sure you can tell, I am super proud of her and so impressed. She surprises, astounds me all the time. And I love this language stuff. I love watching it evolve and noticing what little linguistic frontiers she is exploring each day. Introducing a minority language, all by myself was not necessarily 'easy'. It required effort to consciously change to speaking to my child exclusively in a language I hardly ever used anymore and did not share with any of my local friends. It wasn't easy but somehow I couldn't not do it. "This is my gift to you, my child, something that flows to you from me like milk"... I couldn't not do this, I couldn't not connect her to the culture of her ancestors or her living family, now, in Portugal. I had to do this for her and, as I said it is awakening something in me, too. I am GLAD that I am doing it, too. It feels right.

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Now tell me about you and the way different languages are weaving themselves into your family life.