As our multilingual babies grow into toddlers and beyond, they will almost always show a preference for the dominant, sometimes called community, language. How we react to this can have a big impact on our child’s language development, so it’s important to have a good strategy in place ahead of time. But, don’t despair if your child is older and you are already seeing the effects of their preference for the dominant language. Multilingual Parenting shares some great insight on that here.
My child is responding in the wrong language
Just this morning, I asked my son Emiliano if he wanted to go to daycare to see his friends. I was speaking Spanish, but he responded with “yeah” and then went over to the shoe rack and asked for his “boots”. When his vocabulary was still very small and we, first-time parents that we are, couldn’t get past our awe of his new words we let this type of thing slide. “Yeah” and “all done” were the gateway words. We let them slip into our vocabulary around the house because we were just so tired of “no”. Lovely though it is that “no” is the same in English and Spanish, we were very relieved when Emiliano came home from daycare saying “yeah” one day. But what does that mean for his Spanish?
But why does my bilingual child prefer the dominant language?
Children, like all people, are cognitive misers. This means that we resist learning and storing information in our brains unless we see a purpose for it.
That might sound pretty unflattering, but it is a relief to know that our children are not rejecting our languages because they hate us and don’t care about our culture. If you find yourself taking your child’s rejection personally, remember that they are just trying to use their brains smarter, not harder. They have figured out that a certain language is dominant and inferred that they could get by without learning the minority language.
How to move from cognitive miser to word miser?
This is at the heart of multilingual parenting: you have to create a need for your language. There are as many strategies for this as there are multilingual families because different strategies will work better in certain contexts and with certain personalities. Think about the following strategies and how you could implement or adapt them in a way that best suits your family and circumstance.
Context based – This is (more or less) the strategy that our family is using. We always speak Spanish to Emiliano while we are at home, and he goes to an English-language daycare. This distinction based on the different contexts of home and daycare has worked very well: Emiliano figured out that he was learning two languages at about 18 months. Now he can translate for us and almost always selects the correct language for a given context. He does, however, do some code-switching (as in the above anecdote).
Day based – I have seen some families do very well with strategies based on days. They may alternate between languages on a daily or weekly basis, or speak a certain language on weekends. Our family is including this strategy in our plan to add a third language. We will do OPOL (dad speaks Spanish and mom Speaks French) during the week and Spanish only on the weekends, once Emiliano starts French pre-school.
OPOL (One Parent One Language) – The name says it all, each parent speaks a different language. I have seen several families within my own circle use it successfully, but I would caution against using it if the parent that spends more hours per week with the child speaks the dominant language. Remember, your child will be automatically more attracted to the dominant language and you need to provide more contact with the minority language. Trilingual Mama has some great insight into this strategy on her blog (hint: trilingual).
How to respond to code-switching and dominant language preference?
You might be wondering how these strategies are going to help you. Your child REFUSES to speak your language. Toddlers and children can be impressively stubborn and trying to force them to speak a language they don’t want to is as far-fetched as asking them to eat a proper meal at the table without getting any of it in their hair.
Remember, the trick is to create a need for your language. If you can clearly define spaces where the minority language is used or people who use it, your child will be less likely to assume that they can always communicate in the dominant language.
An insider tip: redirecting
My family has had a clear and consistent people and context based strategy in place since before our son was born, but he is still attracted to the dominant language and often tests the waters to see if he can use it with us as well. After the first glow of him actually speaking real intelligible words wore off, and I noticed that code-switching was putting our Spanish at risk, I came up with a strategy.
I love Janet Lansbury and the RIE approach to parenting, so I knew that ignoring Emiliano when he uses English words wasn’t going to work for me. We needed to find a method that was based on connection. That being said, I have seen families who were very successful with this strategy. Instead, I do what I call redirecting. For example, if Emiliano says “turkey” I respond with “pavo”, and continue speaking in Spanish. I remind him what the word is in Spanish and then move on.
So far this has worked very well for us, let me know if you use a similar strategy or have experience with this.
Bilingual Child 
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