How old were your children when they began to use words in different languages for the same thing or concept?

[kairete]

@emmalove Ha, "agua" was practically our daughter's first word, too, even before "papá" (Daddy). Now she's in a phase where she says "agua" to talk about all sorts of things: rain outside, the umbrellas people use in the rain, a puddle or any body of water in a picture book, something wet.... When her shirt gets dirty because she spilled something, she says "agua" because she knows that it will soon be washed in water.

 

[mamckay41]

@kairete I'd say 2.5 years old? I mean actually my kid at 1.5 years old knew around 200 words (some overlapping some not between french and mandarin). But at 2.5 they could say all the words In french mandarin and swedish

Now at 4 he finally plstart to speak English without us never talking to him in englsij, just listening to us.

 

[katrina2017]

@kairete French/English house (living in an English-speaking country). Daughter is 22 mo.

Because mom is the English speaker (and I just spend more time with her/talking to her) and we live in an English-speaking country, her English is much more advanced than her French. She can string together 5-6 word sentences in English and has a pretty huge vocabulary, but in French her vocabulary is a bit more limited and she mostly says one-two words or phrases that she's memorized (e.g., qu'est-ce que tu fais papa?") as a concept (i.e., she knows that as a whole it means what are you doing papa?), but she wouldn't be able to parse the individual parts of the sentence down to make a different sentence.

When she was younger, I think her earliest French words came on because of two things: one, some were easier to say in French vs. English at the time due to the sounds she could make. Two, my husband just said certain words more often than me, so those words got reinforced in French more than English.

Now that she's older and more advanced verbally, she does translate between words where she knows the term in both languages pretty instantaneously and seems to be starting to get that mom = English and dad = French. The other day she asked me for her cat - at first she asked for the chat but then she quickly changed it to cat.

She's heading to a French immersion school in the fall so I'll be interested to see how that impacts her development in her minority language!

 

[pak]

@kairete Lad just turned two. Doesn't speak very much yet, quite delayed. Still uses quite a bit of sign language. But he does have some words he has in both languages and he adapts which language he picks to which had been speaking or the context. For example, he will ask to go see 'eend' in Dutch to me, but will ask for 'mama Duck' for an English song about a duck. He will use English preferentially with his dad and family, and Dutch with me or my family. Words he only has in Dutch he will use with his dad, which can be very confusing for my in laws!

 

[polychordtetra]

@kairete My daughter turns 2 in a couple weeks. There are some things she’ll only say in one language but others she’ll say in both, usually things like colors and animals since we’ll point them out while reading books with her. Just in the last week or so, she’ll say a color in English, for example, then if I ask how daddy says it she’ll say it in German. But for the words she only/primarily says in one language, I think it just depends on which language she heard it in first and if we’ve made a strong effort to teach her what it is the other language yet.

 

[martina777]

@kairete Spanish/English household here, with English being the majority community language and both parents speaking both languages although I focus more on Spanish. I think it was around 24/25 months that I realized I could ask her my kid to "translate" colors by saying it in one language and asking for it in the other. We had just moved to another country with a third language for sabbatical and started being explicit with her about language, saying X is Y in Spanish and Z in English, and A in German (the language of her daycare).

She still had a tendency to pick whatever word was easier to pronounce between the two languages, but if we asked for the other language she would tell us the other word.

Fast forward 5 months and now she's asking for everything in both languages and differentiates who speaks what. I'm fielding constant requests to sing a song in English, and then do the exact same song in Spanish. She corrects me on how the song should be if I make the other language version too different

 

[aldredian]

@kairete What you're describing is very common. My son basically picked the word he finds easier to pronounce so there's a mix between the languages.

For the life of me, I can't remember when he did start to say things in the other language. I'm pretty sure it was pretty early. Like around 1.5 but again, random and not frequent. It will usually be things he like. For example, cars. He only says it in Mandarin to me and then one day, I overheard him say it in English to my MIL. But yeah. It's not that many words.

When he is fully able to say in both languages is 1 week before he turned 2 when his language explosion happened. Literally, one night, he picked up one or his colour books and basic pointed at everything and said it in English. Then he did it again and said it in Mandarin. Just literally happened overnight.

 

[kaririopelle]

@kairete My son’s 3 and will switch based on who’s around. With Mommy, it’s mostly English, but some words he just prefers in Japanese. Once (around his 3rd birthday), he said something to me in Japanese, looked confused for a second, laughed and then said the same thing in English.

I hang out with adult bi/multilinguals, too. Most of them have words they prefer in certain languages, so you’ll probably see some mixing forever.

 

[joseymiller]

@kairete 1.5

 

[dmit5487ivan]

@kairete Around 19 months.