Multilingual + Baby Sign Language Anyone?

[kingdomconsul]

We had friends over this weekend and their (non-bilingual) child (15 months) is communicating using signs, following baby sign language (see e.g. here:

). The parents are not fluent in actual sign language (i.e. the local version of ASL), but tought their child selected signs like "milk", "food", "more" etc.

Now, we have already four spoken languages in the mix, and none of the family members in bilingual settings tried baby sign language. Did anyone try it in a bilingual setting?

Note that I am explicitly not referring to our local versions of ASL, because honestly neither of us is comfortable in teaching it as a language.

 

[pak]

@kingdomconsul We are bilingual and used baby signs! It's went perfectly fine and helped out a loooooot as our son was a late speaker, but had been signing competently for months and months before sprach really became a thing.

 

[musicman45]

@kingdomconsul We’re a bilingual household and we used Makaton for baby sign language. It’s kind of universally used for babies here (in the UK), and our chosen nursery said they used it too. So it made sense for us, once our daughter started she already knew signs for more, milk, nappy, please etc which helped the transition

 

[josh0302]

@kingdomconsul We have 3 languages in our household and I introduced some baby sign language to our LO. (Mama, dada, more, milk, eat, play, bath, sleep, happy) I only used English when introducing the signs though (ex: I'd say the word 'more' in English as I sign 'more' in baby sign). At around 20mo our daughter started flipping through the 3 languages for one word, so if I were to sign 'more', she would say it back in a language other than English.

 

[seeker112]

@kingdomconsul We tried from maybe 6-18mo. Both parents got up to using maybe a dozen signs and saying the words in our respective languages. But aside from “more” “food” and “milk” our kiddo never really took to it and started talking instead anyway. We just sort of stopped once we were hearing/understanding more baby talk.

 

[nguyenhoangy]

@kingdomconsul We are just beginning to use sign language here, baby is 4,5 months. Intuitively it seemed like a good thing for him to have a universal form of communication that is independent from the different spoken languages in our household. Very happy to see the many people positive experiences in this thread!!

 

[paulrhys]

@kingdomconsul We are a bilingual family and we did baby sign language, we loved it! My daughter ended up being and early speaker so I feel like we didn’t use it for very long but we really all enjoyed it. We started introducing signs at around 5 months and she started signing back at 10-11 months old. At 12 months old she could even ask for the potty! It made our daily life so much easier and it actually felt really special to see our child communicating with us at such a young age.

 

[ativyl]

@kingdomconsul Trilingual plus some ASL signs here. Not the language ASL because I'm not fluent. Just a few signs as a supplement.

So far (22 months in a family of later talkers), kid seems to pick up signs the fastest (we repeat it fewer times before he starts doing it back) and is communicating in sign "sentences" (more sleep, for example) but no mouth word sentences. But he might have more mouth words (combining all 3 languages) than signs.

 

[pterinochilus]

@kingdomconsul Our kid only got as far as "eat" and "more" in baby sign language, and those were the only ideas he really ever cared to convey (even in our spoken languages!).

 

[kingdomconsul]

Thank you for all of your replies! This is super encouraging, and I thing we will just try and see what happens. Thanks so much!

 

[tanasee]

@kingdomconsul We (and our monolingual daytime childcare person) used a small vocabulary of baby signs in a trilingual household, and that went over fine with our child. She was very quick to replace signs with verbalisations between 12-15 months, though, and we naturally stopped using the gestures.

A family that signs more confidently, or uses a sign language as one of their languages, would likely find this practice more meaningful.

I personally had a hard time with the concept of ASL-like signs but not actually learning ASL. I do very much like the idea of helping younger children to communicate simple concepts before they're able to articulate, and I believe there are many ways to do this successfully, with or without signs.