French catches up

My very British Beiruti: "Look, rain!"

My very British Beiruti: “Look, rain!”

It has finally happened. I’m finally seeing the effect of living in France on my Beirut baby’s language skills. Though she consistently speaks French to her dad, English used to be her default language for singing to herself or talking to herself while playing. Now not only is she starting to speak and sing to herself in French more, her sentences are getting longer and clearer.

Last week she managed to break the lightbulb in the lamp in her room which she loves to turn on and off. Annoyed at not having a functioning lamp, she decided that the best course of action was to exchange it for the one in our room. After all, it looks the same and – as yet – still works. “S’il te plaît avoir celui dans la chambre de mummy et daddy et allumer?” she asked. (Please have the one in mummy and daddy’s bedroom and turn on?)

Suddenly her French has drawn almost level with her English. I say almost, because I’ve not heard her use any kind of “when” or “if” construction as she does in English: “Can I have a yoghurt when I finished the lasagne?” Or temporal references such as: “Last time we play with the game with the girls and it’s broken.” Though she can string a sequence of actions together in French using après: “Toi tu fais celui-ci et après moi fais l’autre.

It took nearly four months in France to make an audible difference to her French skills. Granted, they were busy months, finding a flat and having a baby, all the while planning our next move. We haven’t had a lot of time for French play dates. It was easier to just hang out with her cousins who speak mostly English at home. She is always out and about with me in town and with our adult French friends. But she hasn’t been to any school or childcare that would have brought her into daily contact with children who speak only French. Had I put her in playschool it would really have been an immersion. But language doesn’t dictate all our life choices.

It goes to show that while children learn languages with amazing ease, they will only do so in the right circumstances, that is, if they have a decent level of exposure and see them as living languages. After all, they can entirely unlearn a language they once spoke if they stop hearing it altogether at a young age. It becomes a dead language, inaccessible, locked away at the back of the mind.

French should never be that way for my daughter, but I don’t want it to be only a passive skill either, where she understands but struggles to express herself. So I’m delighted to see her making progress in French, the way she knows her little stories off by heart and loves to be quizzed on them and how after the last page is read and the book closed she reopens it with a hopeful “On recommence?”

Which family language?

Look mummy I draw a hexagon!

Look mummy I draw a hexagon!

After I took a phone call yesterday, my daughter told me: “No mummy, not say Âllo on the telephone, say Hello.” While I have some issues with being bossed around by a 2-year old, this is actually a good sign. The most important element of the one-person-one-language (OPOL) approach to bringing up bilingual kids, anyone will tell you, is consistency. It can be hard when both parents speak the other parent’s language fluently. It’s sometimes tempting to chip in with the other parent. You have to be really determined to stick to your half of the job. We can’t have done too badly, since she’s started picking us up if we accidentally let slip a word in the wrong language. I think this might not have been the case had we stayed in Lebanon, where people mix the languages so freely, they are barely aware of it. The necessary rigidity of the one-person-one-language distinction would have been a hard concept to grasp for the Lebanese, who embody linguistic adaptability.

Still, I do make some exceptions to always speaking English. I feel my daughter gets more than enough of it already. The fact is that English will always be the more obvious choice, partly through me being her main caregiver, and partly through its dominance on the cultural scene. We aren’t planning to live in France in the near future, so the community won’t be able to counterbalance these factors. So I work to bolster French a little by reading her usual bedtimes stories (all French) even when it’s my turn to put her down for the night or for a nap. Other than that I restrict myself to using French when she’s with French-speaking playmates and playing songs and any DVDs in French.

But I’m afraid it won’t be enough. We’re always aware that if we don’t create a need or a use for both languages our kids might just opt out of one. She is already aware that daddy understands everything she says in English. All her extended family on his side speak good or native English too. That doesn’t leave much need for French. Plus our influence as parents is constantly diminishing as the community plays an ever greater role in her life. I figure we were responsible for about 45% of exposure each while she was a baby. Now, though, not only does she spend more time with the community, she is more susceptible to it. No matter that mummy and daddy both pronounce a word a certain way, she wants to pronounce it like the other little girls. Right now those little girls are French so it’s “Sharlie”, not “Charlie”. But soon enough those little girls will be English or Spanish.

I’m not going to break the OPOL law and start speaking French to her. I think it would confuse her, not help her (not to mention that it would be unkind to inflict my accent on her). And I’m not going to stick her in front of French cartoons every day just to sugar the pill, though I will look out some audiobooks or rhymes for car journeys. The other remaining element within my power is the language we speak as a couple.

English has always been our main language. Of course we are used to talking French together in French company and in French contexts. We’ve both lived in France for years. So we’ve begun speaking more French as a family language. But while my husband grew up with French, I didn’t and I feel it. As a student, on the beam that crossed my chambre de bonne angled just so I’d bang my head getting out of bed, I had pinned a number of quotes. One read: “Je préfère mourir incompris que de passer ma vie à m’expliquer.” On the beam that ran through the kitchenette-cum-shower room, another read: “If you can name the world you can control it.” The days when books made up 90% of my possessions and I drafted long essays by hand are over. But those quotes still ring true to me. I miss the precision that speaking in my native tongue affords me.