Question
My son is now 15 months. I speak Arabic with him and he can say few words. We live in Germany and I have to take him to kindergarten but I'm afraid that it would be difficult for him to understand a new language. Would you please advise?
Answer
You are asking a very important question, considering that we live in a very multicultural world! Every parent who is raising a child using his/her native language (L1) within the other language (L2) environment inevitably thinks that their child will have difficulties in
1) acquiring a new language and
2) preserving the native language.
However, studies, such as the one by Lenneberg, a famous linguist who studied bilingual language acquisition from birth, suggest that between the age of 2 and puberty language can be learned by exposure. It means that your child may seem "bewildered" initially, but will begin to understand the meaning of the words in his L2 (German) very quickly. The phenomenon is known as "fast mapping," meaning that children begin to map new words to their referents. Although this term is usually applied to a child learning new vocabulary in her native language, it can also be applied to learning the L2.
But if you want your child to preserve L1, you may use a strategy suggested by Maurice Grammont in 1913 to his friend and fellow linguist, Jules Ronjat, who wanted his son to learn German and French. The advice was: observe the rule of "one person - one language." In your case, one person will be you and your family (I am assuming that they also speak Arabic), and another person(s) will be the environment where the child will be exposed to German. Later on, as the child grows, the maintenance of L1 will depend on the level of exposure and interaction with L2. In any case, you will have a bilingual child, and bilingual children show a lot of cognitive advantages.
Dr. Elena Zaretsky, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders at UMass, Amherst. She is part of the team of professors in that department who received a four-year DOE grant to better educate and train graduate students to work with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Her other interest include language learning disabilities and reading acquisition, as well as issues in bilingualism.
