Words words words

At seventeen months (today, in fact), Small Boy doesn’t talk much. Oh, he babbles all the time and has long one-sided conversations with the car keys, the television remote, our cordless phone, his toy phone, and his chop-stick; but you’d be hard pressed to find a word in there that an adult Swiss, German, or English speaker would actually recognize as a word. Since boys generally begin speaking later than girls, and since bilingual children generally begin speaking later than monolingual children, and since we’re raising a bilingual boy in what is essentially a tri-lingual environment, I try not to worry about this too much. But given that I’m such a motor-mouth I do find it curious and, indeed, a tiny bit worrisome.

A lot of parents of bilingual children will tell you that their children didn’t start talking until the end of their second year, but I’ve seen some literature that suggests that the delay for bilingual children relative to monolingual children is actually closer to the delay for boys relative to girls; that is, about four to six weeks rather than the much longer delay assumed by conventional wisdom. I can’t explain this discrepancy, and I tend to trust parents’ assessments of their own children, so when my friends with bilingual children tell me their children didn’t start speaking until quite late – compared to where they "should be" on a developmental assessment chart, anyway – I tend to believe them. And in light of the linguistic chaos Small Boy negotiates on any given day, I figure I can afford to cut him some slack in the Onset of Speech department.

R and I are taking a one-parent one-language approach: each parent speaks one and only one language with the child. It sounds straightforward, and for the most part it is, but consider: although I speak only English with the Boy I often speak German (not Dialekt) in front of him - with my in-laws, in a store or restaurant, when we visit the Mütterberaterin, with some of the mothers in play group. He hears me switching back and forth, and that must be confusing on some level. I know he knows the difference between the two languages, because sometimes he gives me a funny look when he hears me suddenly and unexpectedly speaking German (if I’m with an English speaking girlfriend and we run into a non-English speaking friend in the street, for example). It must be even more confusing when he watches R switch from Dialekt with him to English with me, unless we’re at his parents’ in which case he speaks Dialekt with Small Boy and German with me, unless his parents aren’t in the room and then we might speak English or German, depending; but if the two of them are visiting his parents without me R stays in Dialekt the whole time. I get confused just writing all of that so I can only imagine what Small Boy’s mental map of the world must look like. So really, I’ve tried not to worry about the delay.

But that doesn’t mean that I’m not pretty jazzed that Small Boy has suddenly discovered words. Not many, and nothing complicated, but he’s got a fistful of words now, words to describe the things near and dear to his heart. Wawa for water; baww for ball; bawoo for balloon; tuh for sun; tahr for star; memeh for musik; and bam for both buses and trams (and who can expect a 17-month old to tell the difference between a bus and a tram anyway?). Anybody who knows German might notice something about those words. They’re all cognates or close enough to them; water/Wasser, ball/Ball, balloon/Balloon, sun/Sonne, star/Stern, music/Musik, bus/Bus, tram/Tram. There are some exceptions in his little vocabulary: ah dahn for all done when he’s finished eating and dahn for down (and yes, the dahn in ah dahn and the dahn in dahn do sound different) are clearly English, and R and I haven’t heard him use their Swiss equivalents. But buhmuh for flowers is clearly Swiss (Blumen). To date his vocabulary seems to be English or English-Swiss sound-alikes except for that buhmuh. And that Swiss word is telling: his Grossmütti always brings him flowers and he loves making a big show of sticking his face in them and sniffing them - I can hear him inhaling from across the room. Grossmütti must say Blumen a hundred times for every time I say flowers, but I think more than just the repetition of the word it’s that he connects flowers to Grossmütti and her world, and her world is Swiss.

If I’m right, it’s a good sign. He’s learning language in context, using the words that make the most sense to him, making associations, building a mental world and figuring out where things belong in his own world.

At 17 months Small Boy doesn’t talk much, but he’s got a fistful of words now. He’s got wawa and he’s got tahr and he’s got buhmuh.

Buhmuh.

My son is instinctively bilingual.

Buhmuh!