@zhuru523 It is not constrained to 3. There is a natural constraint on how many languages a child can learn because there are only so many hours in the day when they're awake and can be exposed to language. Likewise, there are only so many people that spend enough time with your child speaking a language consistently for them to pick it up. But they're definitely capable of learning more than 3.
Source: I have a PhD in psycholinguistics and neuroscience and have taught language acquisition for years.
@mayfrancis Wait so theoretically speaking, given the perfect conditions and language learning environment…
How many languages could a baby/kid learn until adulthood? I wonder if there were any studies/experiments on this
@zhuru523 That question is hard to answer because there are a lot of facets to it.
Do you mean "learning" as in natively from a very young age, or learning as an L2 in school?
"Mastery" is hard to define, and varies widely even among native speakers.
It also depends on how related the languages are. Spanish, English, and French are a much easier combination than Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili Finnish.
@trueform Of course it would depend on your definition of trilingual or quadrilingual (because it doesn’t necessarily mean full fluency and identical vocabulary across all languages) but it’s certainly possible to be quadrilingual and I know a couple of people who grew up exposed to 5 languages and they are fluent in all of them.
My kids are growing up quadrilingual and my 5-year-old is on an age appropriate level on all of them (Portuguese, Finnish, French and English).
That 20%-30% figure does get thrown around a lot but it’s not a hard and fast rule because there are so many different variables.
@pattianne4 Similar situation. My wife grew up in a place where two languages are spoken natively. I speak a language that's completely unrelated (different language family from the other side of the globe). We both speak English.
We thought four languages would be too much to start with, so we're aiming for trilingual to start with. We're doing one-parent-one-language. I'm speaking my non-English language, and she chose the less common of her two non-English languages. Her other language is common enough that we figure our child can learn it later in school. And English is the community language here, so we're not worried about that.
@4bears Can I ask how old your child is and how it's going? We have a 2y2m old boy and we are still on 10-15 words only with no 2 work sentences. Doing 3 languages, one parent one language. He clearly understands all three languages but it still hasn't clicked yet for him to start speaking. Wondering how it's going for other people.
@frandamian86 He's just about to turn 10 months, so it's still a little too early to tell. He clearly understands some stuff in each language, like certain phrases that he tends to hear more in one language than the other.
He's just starting to say his first words. Mama and baba he says pretty clearly with intention. He sometimes seems to be saying the names of one of our cat's names, or also one of the language's "grandma". But those are harder to tell apart from random babbling.
So, so far it seems like he's on track and hitting all of his milestones, but it's very early.
If your hubby grew up in his home country with no extra language planning then chances are your kids will grow up in a similar way! Of course there might be individual differences in how kids learn but your husband is a living example of the success of that approach If at some point it looks like it’s not working, you can see what you can do to adjust. Just keep speaking your language exclusively to the baby and you’ll be fine! While we don’t have the exact same setup (we have two minority languages at home and two community languages outside the home), I can tell you that 4 is totally doable if the baby has constant, good quality exposure to all the languages.
Me and hubby have a podcast where we talk about our journey raising multilingual kids, maybe it’ll be interesting to you as a fellow parents dealing with 4 languages: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2188357/share
