speaking in tongues

It is quite a privilege to be part of a bilingual family. During my undergraduate studies I was interested in language acquisition, particularly second language acquisition, and, by extension (though it is not the same thing) bilingualism. As I became more fluent in French, and found myself becoming comfortable speaking two languages and switching between them constantly, I wondered what it would be like to grow up with that. I couldn't help envying anyone who didn't have to put hours of effort into learning a second language!

When Marc and I decided to have children, I don't remember even considering the idea of bringing up our children monolingually. It would have seemed odd to me not to speak my mother tongue to my own children – despite not minding speaking French to my husband most of the time! – and since both of us understood both languages, there didn't seem to be any reason not to. What's more, since we knew by then that we were heading for Benin, where the official language is French but many missionaries are English-speaking, it seemed logical to give our kids a headstart.

We chose the OPOL (one person one language) model of bilingualism, whereby one parent speaks one language to the child(ren) and the other speaks the other. In our case that seemed the most natural way to do things.

To my shame as a linguist, I haven't done any formal study on Simon's language acquisition, though to be fair we've been pretty busy doing other study and moving countries since his birth. But from very early on I was impressed by the the way he obviously understood both languages. As he began to speak, we were living in England, and he was going to nursery in an English-speaking setting. So although we'd decided to deliberately speak French between us parents, his English developed faster than his French (in production, at any rate).

When we moved to Benin, for the first eight months he was hearing and speaking more French than English, as he was spending most of his time outside the family with French-speaking Africans. It was fairly obvious that his French production overtook his English at that point. After we moved to the village we were spending quite a lot of time with Grace, an English-speaking Canadian, and the Africans we now spend time with speak more Monkolé than French. His English has seemed to catch up again, and he has started speaking a few words of Monkolé! (So I guess soon I'll be able to say that we are a trilingual family!)

A few months ago another missionary we didn't know very well called in, and in our conversation he was asking about whether Simon spoke French or English better. So I decided to ask Simon:

Mummy: Which language do you speak best, Simon, English or French?
Simon: English.
Mummy (out of earshot of Simon): Peut-être si Papa pose la question en français la réponse sera différente!
Papa: Simon, c'est quelle langue que tu parles mieux, le français ou l'anglais?
Simon (with a huge grin): English!

There's nothing wrong with his sense of humour!

Simon always uses French to speak to Marc and English to me, except occasionally when he decides to joke with me and says something like, “Maman? Qu'est-ce que tu fais?” If I reply in French it makes him laugh. He's used to hearing me speak French, but not to him!

One thing I always wondered about was which language our children would use to speak to each other. It is very interesting – and I can't explain it – to see that Simon prefers to speak English with Benjy than French. A typical example occurred the other day when the following conversation took place at a mealtime.

Marc: Dis merci à Benjamin, Simon.
Simon: Merc- thank-you, Benjy!

Benjy already understands both English and French very well, and has himself begun using a few words – a real mixture! He says “Mumma” (a mixture of Mummy and Maman), “amam” (for both “amen” and “all gone”!), “au'voir”, “bravo” (in French), “aawo” (Monkolé for “no”!), “honey”, “brr-brm” (for any vehicle) and a whole host of animal noises!

As for my poor brain, now that I'm using a third language on a daily basis, sometimes when I switch out of Monkolé I find myself speaking English instead of French!