Bilingualism

Instead of finishing the year with a review of 2008's ups and downs, I'll summarize a few thoughts on bilingualism (even though I'm not the specialist in linguistics in the family).

With me being a French person and Hilary being a British citizen, we wanted to raise Simon as a bilingual child (and we have the same plan for #2).

Before Simon's birth we had already decided to follow the OPOL model that is One Parent One Language. As illustrated below, I speak with Simon in French and Hilary speaks with him in English.

We also decided that Hilary and I would speak together in French so that when we are in the UK, Simon can hear some more French.

Throughout this year, it appears that Simon is becoming bilingual. During the first half of this year, because we were at Bible college here in the UK, Simon spoke more English. We also noticed that he chose to use the words that were the simpliest in one of his two languages. For example, he would use "please" instead of "s'il te plait" and he would use "pain" instead of "bread".

But after some time in France (over the summer and in October), his French clearly improved and his vocabulary developed greatly (especially in October).

Since we're back in the UK, it also appears that now Simon uses mostly French when he speaks to me and mostly English when he speaks to Hilary or his English grand-parents.