Wednesday 9 September 2009

Willy

With the number of words that Sam is saying gaining exponential speed, I have been taking another look at some of the resources out there for raising bilingual children. I recently found out that the way we communicate in our family has a name. It is called OPOL - or one parent, one language. Aksel and I both only speak our mother tongue to the children. And we expect them to use that language when they speak to us. This method works really well for us because we all speak and understand the "other" language. We don't need to use another method that involves a "round the dinner table language" that everyone understands. When we are all together, Anna simply switches from Danish to English, depending on who she is speaking to. It seems very natural for her to do this.

When she was little, I was quite concerned about her learning English properly. What if she doesn't talk to me in English? What if we never have that natural communication? What if my parents can't understand her? All my worries were totally unfounded and she was babbling away in both languages by 18 months. And by 2, she had pretty much sorted it out. Daddy spoke Danish, Mummy spoke English. That is just how her world is.

We are doing the same with Sam, this time without even really thinking about it. He already has lots of words in both languages and uses the Danish version (bil, tog, nøgle) with Daddy and the English version (car, train, keys) with me, already quite consistently.
It will be interesting to see what language Anna and Samuel use with each other as they get older. Right now, Anna mostly chats in English with him, but it is quite one-sided.
Sometimes Anna will say a few words in Danish to me to wind me up and to make fun. Lille mor she will say. Må jeg ikke nok, lille mor?* She knows this kind of expression makes my skin crawl ....and makes me laugh.

When Anna and I talk English to each other in Denmark, people sometimes assume that we can't understand Danish. We were in a lift together in a shopping centre the other day. Two boys got in with us. They were perhaps 11 or 12 years old. They noticed that we were speaking English and they giggled with each other about it. Then one of them suddenly said very loudly: Tissemand! It means a boy's willy. Not a really, really rude word. But probably also not something you would talk about in a lift with strangers. They obviously thought it was quite hilarious until they realised that we had understood exactly what it meant. He was quite embarrassed when I said in Danish something like: "Well, that's a rather strange thing to shout about in public!"

Afterwards, I was kicking myself for not coming up with a better line like: "Really? Where?" Or "What, is it not very big?" Although, the poor lad was probably traumatised enough by the situation, without any extra help from me.

*roughly translated it means in a very creepy and a little bit disturbing way "little mummy, please can I, little mummy?"

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