If the mother speaks one language, the father speaks another, and the child lives in a country with a third language — will the child speak all three well and after how long?

One Answer

1. In Canada, the situation when three-linga and even four-linga children grow up in a family is quite typical for families of emigrants and emigrants in the second generation. For example, parents communicate with each other in English;the child goes to a French kindergarten where English lessons are taught; the mother speaks to the child in her native language, and the father in his own. If development is normal, the child understands well where and what language, does not lag behind their peers in anything, and sometimes surpasses them. Children at the age of about 4 years perfectly understand what language and with whom to conduct a conversation and can quite agree, the child distinguishes the languages themselves much earlier. However, the child will learn to speak better in the language in which they communicate more often and more often. Therefore, whether a child becomes a real trilingan or chetryrekhlingan depends on the parents, as well as on whether it will be possible to find friends to communicate in a particular language, as well as whether it will be possible to love reading and writing in each of the languages, whether the culture or some separate episode in the process of growing up will not cause rejection. I sometimes observe a situation when an adult is already fluent in two languages, speaks and understands the third perfectly, can even conduct business correspondence, but reading a book or understanding a film will already require considerable effort, and the fourth language is spoken only at a basic level, while reading something or writing will cause very serious difficulties.

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