How to prepare for a bilingual baby — The strategies

Even before our daughter was born, we prepared ourselves for her bilingual life in any way we could. From researching the theoretical side to practical things like ordering books and making sure our own English was up to speed. In this little blog series I will discuss all of them. This particular post will be about the different strategies or ways to raise your bilingual baby.

In short, there are 5 main strategies or ways on how to raise your child bilingual (or even trilingual). Choosing the strategy that suits your particular family, wishes and abilities is very important for parents. I repeat, for the parents. Many parents need a structure in which to work, in order not to neglect one of the languages in the long run.
For the children, it doesn’t matter whatever you do. You can stick to one, mix a few or create an entirely new strategy, kids won’t be affected negatively or positively by any of them. For the kids, the quality and input of the languages is more important than anything.

Okay, back to the strategies. All are abbreviated to confuse people more.
1. OPOL
2. ML@H
3. T&L or OSOL
4. FSC
5. MLP

1. OPOL (One-Parent-One-Language)
This is a strategy that is used a lot for “naturally bilingual families”, often with intercultural backgrounds. Each parent speaks in their own (often native*) language while addressing the child. The child will speak language A with one parent, and language B with the other. Even when both parents are present, they still use their ‘own’ language to the child. This can be very straining to keep up, especially if one parent doesn’t understand the other language.

2. ML@H (Minority Language at Home)
Just like with OPOL, this strategy is also used a lot for the “naturally bilingual families”, often with parents who have migrated together to a different country. The parents both speak the same (often native*) language A, in an environment that mainly speaks language B. The child will speak language A at home with his parents, and language B in school and with friends etc.

3. T&L (Time and Location) / OSOL (One-Situation-One-Language)
This is one of the strategies that require a certain fluency from both parents, in both languages. The language that is used, is dependent on a time and location, or specific situation. The child will maybe speak language A all day, and use language B during dinner time and bed-rituals, or any other chosen situation.

4. FSC (First Sentence Counts)
This strategy is close to the T&L/OSOL, but shows more flexibility. Here too, both parents should both be able to speak both languages. Whenever a conversation is started, the rest of that conversation is in the chosen language. The child or parent will maybe start talking about school in language A, then change the topic to groceries in language B and change back to language A for story time.

5. MLP (Mixed Language Policy)
The last strategy is not a real strategy in my opinion, but is certainly worth mentioning. With MLP, both parents use mixed languages in their communications. This can either mean mixing and changing languages in times, situations, places, between sentences or even changing mid-sentence to the other language. Although this might seem confusing for the child, it is actually not. Children are able to pick up both languages in all those situations, it is the parents that often get confused.

To emphasize this again, no strategy is better than the other. It all boils down to what suits your family situation and wishes. Don’t be afraid to mix things up and find your own tailored strategy. Consider what your language goals are for your child and make sure the quality and input are enough to reach that goal.

Personally, we use a ML@H strategy. We speak English at home with our daughter, while at all other places she hears Dutch. To add in a bit of T&L, we do speak Dutch whenever we have guests over. This purely to keep the friends we have and not annoy them too much ;)

What strategies do you want to use or are you already using? And did you change it in the course of time? Let me know, and thanks for reading!

* Regarding OPOL and ML@H, often parents speak their own native language. This doesn’t mean you have to though! Just like in our situation, you can also choose a non-native language to use in all of the situations, as long as you are fluent enough.

Originally published at https://intentionallybilingual.weebly.com.