All the different bilinguals in my home
Sunday, February 2, 2025
There is no one way to raise bilingual kids. Every family is different, and the context where they learn language can change. Previously I wrote about bilingualism expectations (and plurilingualism) in the context of raising our kids.
If you think about bilingualism in terms of time, there are generally two categories: sequential bilingualism and simultaneous bilingualism. In the first case, one learns a first language and then later learns a second language. In the second case, one learns (two or more!) languages at the same time.
Just looking at my household, in a family of four we have THREE different kinds of linguistic backgrounds!
- I am a sequential bilingual, going from English → Japanese when I was about 20
- My wife is a sequential bilingual, from Japanese → English in her 20s
- My first daughter was raised in Japanese until she went to preschool in Canada — a sequential bilingual similar to my wife but much earlier at age 5
- By the time my second daughter started speaking, the first daughter was already speaking English and Japanese in the household, so she might be considered the household’s only simultaneous bilingual
Why is this important? Well, like I said, raising bilingual kids depends a lot on the context of that particular learner. We need to be aware that each of our kids have a different context and thus our expectations should be adjusted accordingly. Like I wrote before expectations around bilingualism and raising kids are often out of whack. The framework of sequential-simultaneous bilingualism adds is another useful frame for aligning your expectations (and therefore effort) to reality.
Final note: the multilingual multiverse
There are many other frameworks for thinking about multilingualism. In this post looked at time of language acquisition. In my other post I wrote on heritage language learners and plurilingualism. There are also receptive bilinguals, those who can understand a language even if they cannot produce it. And then of course bimodal bilinguals who use language in at least two different modes, for example audio-oral language and visual-spatial sign language. And these are just super-categories! At a personal level there are so many other possible dimensions… fascinating!